2012: A Renewal
by GlacierRat
Summary: 2012 is upon them, and Mulder and Scully find that they can't escape the prophecies that they thought they had left behind with the FBI.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Mulder, Scully, William, or Skinner, although I truly wish I did. I am not making money on this endeavor, although I truly wish I were.

Reviews are welcome.

Chapter 1

_Rural Wyoming_

The dark-haired boy was quite tall and long-limbed for his age. It seemed like it would take years for him to fill out, if he ever did. Despite this lankiness, he looked unexpectedly coordinated as he ran, a product of six years of martial arts training. He ignored the sting of the green-gold Wyoming prairie grass whipping around his knees below the ragged edges of his long jean cut-offs, and fell into a sustainable rhythm as the swishing sound filled his ears. The rhythm lulled his senses, and he reached a sort of trance state as he ran, a peaceful passivity settling on his features. He gained a slight rise, barely noticeable under the waving stalks, and stopped dead. His sudden and complete stillness was as remarkable as his coordination, simply unnatural in an eleven-year-old boy. He stood frozen like an antelope and listened, a faint frown etching a tiny line vertically on the sun-browned skin between his finely sketched brows. The sun stained the sky red and orange, and sank lower, gilding the waving grass in the fields and emphasizing the golden brown of his bare shoulders. He didn't even know what he listened for, but he went to the same spot every day, as if he might hear something new. Of course, he didn't really believe that, once he returned to his house each day. When he was at his house, at school, in town, anywhere but here, he thought the lure was simply the promise of going somewhere beyond this, beyond the placid modesty of rural Wyoming. He dreamed big, he knew, but dreams were … just dreams. And dreams were insubstantial, without real form. But, there was something about this field that made him think that it was possible to accomplish those big dreams, something he didn't feel anywhere else. His lids drifted over his eyes and blocked out the colors, although he could still perceive the faintest echo of the sunset through his closed eyes, and he turned his face to the brightest spot to let the dying sun's warmth wash his face.

"Wi-i-i-i-i-i-ll!"

The boy turned his head imperceptibly towards the thin sound carried to him on the ever-present wind of the prairie. He suddenly had the air of someone trying to listen to more than one conversation at once; the distraction was unwelcome. His breath huffed out as his tension melted into defeat, and his shoulders drooped a bit below their normal proud station.

"Will! Dinner!"

Will sighed and turned fully towards the faint sound of his mother's distant voice, yelling out, "Coming, Mom!" He felt his words being whipped unceremoniously away by the wind in the wrong direction, and he knew that his mother couldn't possibly have heard him, so he waved instead. He started reluctantly back towards the sprawling white farm house, temporarily tinted a peachy red by the setting sun. The scrub brush on the hill behind the house was so dark that the house appeared to glow in contrast. Looking back over his bare shoulder towards the rise, he acknowledged uncomfortably that he would rather have stayed there, than to face his mother right now. His reluctance to return to the sprawling house was expressed in the lethargy of his footsteps. As lithe and energetic as his run had been towards the rise, his walk back was just as sluggish. He dragged his sensitive long fingers through the waving grass, feeling the heavy crispness almost as a pain, both physical and mental. Will felt depressed, drawn, and listless. It was summer, for crying out loud! Why did he feel this way? He took a last lingering look at the rise behind him and plodded on, staring at his feet.

At the sharp sound of a slamming door, he looked up from the mesmerizing sight of his large feet thumping along between the grass stalks. The stock manager, Jack, was coming out of the large brown equipment barn beside the house. A huge, gruff man, Jack had been hired after Will's father had died three years ago, and he took care of most of the stock-related chores for Will's mother. He also hired the temporary labor, managed them, and generally turned a profit for Gwen Van de Kamp. He was a decent guy, but Will couldn't get close to the brusque rancher. He missed his father's easy camaraderie, and felt distant and disconnected from everyone lately, even his mother. He knew that his reticence hurt his mother; he could see it in her expressive brown eyes, but he couldn't pull himself out of it. He went through the motions of chores and daily routines without sensing that he was part of any of it. He felt a strange sense of being meant for something else entirely, but of being trapped, like he'd missed the last transport ship off of a dying planet. The only thing he seemed to connect with was his martial arts training, and he trained as if his life depended on it. He spent part of every day at the dojo, and practiced at home as well. He felt tranquil as he went through his patterns like a kind of meditation. His sensei seemed to understand that he was unusually driven, even if he did not understand the reasons for it. Will himself didn't even understand what drove him.

Will slowed further and watched Jack make his way to the house, where he usually ate with Will and Gwen when there weren't any ranch hands in the bunk house. Will had a feeling that Jack knew something about him that he himself didn't know, and this bothered him. Maybe he would bug him about it after dinner again. Every time he tried to get the man to admit it, he clammed up. Of course, with Jack, the difference between being clammed up and not was barely discernible. Jack started up the back stairs, and Will saw his petite mother come out the door in welcome. She seemed to be moving a bit slower, lately, as if his father had taken some of her life force with him. Dad had died so suddenly, and his mother was all that Will had, now. It scared him that a link like that could be so precarious, there one day, gone the next. Will watched the pair talking, although he couldn't hear their words.

On the porch, Will's mother turned to look at her manager, and asked him, "What's wrong with Will, Jack? He seems … I don't know … distant, off somehow. What's going on with him?" Her light brown eyes drilled into the gray ones of the taciturn farmer standing before her, as if she thought she could make him solve the mystery, simply through force of will.

"Dunno, Gwen." Jack turned his gaze to the approaching boy. "Maybe he's just starting to grow up. Boys change."

"No … it's something else." Gwen Van de Kamp watched her son slowly make his way through the fields to the house. She turned to go back into the house as the gnats started clouding over her head in the slowly cooling air. She stopped without looking back at her friend. "Do you think he suspects?"

"That he's adopted? Maybe. You gonna tell him?"

"I … I don't know. I can't decide. Ray wanted to, when the time was right." She fidgeted with her apron. "But … what if I lose him? What if …"

"Don't borrow trouble, Gwen. It comes for you soon enough." Jack laid a heavy hand on his friend's shoulder and gently squeezed.

Gwen glanced over her shoulder briefly at the big man, quickly clasped and released Jack's hand, acknowledging the comfort intended in the touch, and moved into the kitchen. Jack stood outside, waiting for Will. Eventually, Will made it to the bottom of the stairs. He came out of his stupor and glanced up, surprised to see Jack still outside.

"Hey, Jack." Will tossed a stubborn hank of hair back off of his brow in annoyance. It was a silky chestnut color that tended to gain a reddish tint in the sun, and it made him look like a rich prep school dropout, no matter how it was cut.

"Will." Jack nodded, and then tipped his head down so that the brim of his cap obscured his features.

"There's a lot of bugs tonight," Will commented. "We need a new bug bulb."

"Uh-huh. Listen, son." He glanced up uneasily at Will. "Your mother is worried about you."

Will nodded, not speaking.

"Something going on?" Jack didn't beat around the bush.

The boy turned his troubled gaze on the man. "Jack? You know something about me that I don't know. What is it?"

Damn, Jack thought. Will's gaze was a little too perceptive, and the clear blue-green color shocked Jack every time he met the boy's eyes. It was too adult, too intense, too discerning for his years. He had seen just about every expression that the boy could produce, and every one of them cut at him. "You'll have to have that conversation with your mom."

"Yeah. It'll upset her, though." Thankfully, the kid dropped his gaze, releasing Jack from its power. Jack looked thoughtfully at the boy. What was up with this kid? Did he seem so much older because he was raised as an only child? Because he was so intelligent? Or was something in his unknown heritage coming to light? "Let's go eat." He turned and went into the house, holding the screen for the boy behind him.

The two of them entered the kitchen, a warmly decorated, homey place that Will felt completely comfortable in, despite his earlier reluctance to return to the house. He circled the table to the sink, where he picked up a heavy glass tumbler from the dish drain. He downed a glass of cold well water in one breath. Refilling the glass, Will took it with him to the heavy oak table that his father had built with his help in the barn. The lingering pink from the sunset streamed through the window over the sink and made the entire room glow with its warm color. Glancing at his mother, he saw that the oddly enhanced light suited her and made her seem less tired and less drawn.

Gwen had dinner on the table, and Will suddenly felt famished. He looked over the dishes and saw mashed potatoes and green beans from last year's garden, and a roast that set his mouth watering. He realized that he had hardly eaten that day, and he had worked very hard. He had been in the barn at daybreak, doing his assigned chores, and went straight to the dojo from there. He reached for the biscuits, and felt his mother slap at his hands. "Your turn," she reminded him.

Will said the familiar words of the grace automatically and without thinking about them, and waited for the small chorus of amens before reaching for the bread again. His religious training was a matter of some discussion between him and his mother, not always congenial. He put up with it most of the time, so as not to distress her, but he had a hard time believing in something so contrived. Still, he knew it comforted his mother to believe that someone was watching over them, so he didn't usually make a big deal out of it. But the very idea of someone watching made Will uncomfortable, as if he had no control over his own destiny. The ensuing sounds of dishes clinking and the concentrated effort of eating kept him from having to make conversation with the two adults.

Gwen looked from under her lashes at this child of her heart, wondering what was troubling him. He should be carefree; it was summertime, and he had nothing pressing on him. Gwen had worried from the beginning that something was wrong with the child. But he was perfectly healthy, in fact, he was never even sick. Who would give up such a beautiful and healthy baby? And he was beautiful. He grew more so, as he grew older. As a baby, he had come to the Van de Kamps with flaxen hair, and those startling long-lashed eyes, taking in everything around him. His hair turned a gleaming shade of copper-penny red as a toddler, and had steadily darkened to the rich chestnut color he sported now. He would become a very handsome man, Gwen thought. What had his birth parents been like? Had they been handsome people? They had to have been, to create such a child.

Gwen herself was rather nondescript, a short, solid woman with graying brown hair, light brown eyes, and regular features. Ray had not been very tall either, but was well-muscled, honed from the hard physical labor of ranching. He had had thinning light brown hair and eyes. Neither had been handsome or striking. The goodness in Ray's heart, his non-threatening friendliness, and his uncompromising work ethic had been enough to snag her attention, and Ray had loved her for her gentle kindness, her calm and trusting heart, and the caring way she looked at him. The two of them had used these qualities to instill in their adopted son the same kind of compassion, kindness and love of work that they embraced. But still, there was something else in Will, something that longed to fly free. Gwen had seen his increased restlessness lately, his need to be somewhere else. It was probably his frightening intelligence. She saw that he perceived things she had no hope of understanding, with a natural and absolute ease, and his facility with language left her speechless. His vocabulary stumped her and his memory was effortless, which meant that he hardly had to put any energy into his school work. He alleviated his boredom with the regular classroom routine by reading anything and everything voraciously, after he had finished his prescribed work. He was never a problem at school, but he started bringing his own reading material in the third grade, when he outgrew the topics in the elementary school library. He read with equal interest topics such as astrophysics, space science, robotics, engineering, medical science, paranormal psychology, aeronautics, and mechanics. He seemed to steer clear of fiction, unless it was science fiction, preferring to read about how things worked, both mechanical and bio-mechanical. And he loved professional medical journals, the kind that documented newly tested drugs and surgical techniques.

Beyond his love of learning was his innate integrity. He was empathetic to the point where he almost couldn't stand other people's emotions without experiencing them as his own. He had a calm serenity that extended to people around him and the ability to soothe people with his voice and still reason. His sense of morality was likewise developed beyond his years.

God, he was only eleven! It was obvious that he was so far beyond what they had to teach him at the local school. Maybe this was simply the crux of his problems this summer. He knew what was in store for him, if he returned to that school in the fall. His teachers had been talking to her about him, since he started kindergarten, already reading at a 5th grade level and discoursing in topics clearly beyond his cohort. But she knew that in this rural area, her only options were to home-school him, or to send him away to some academy for brilliant children. The home-schooling option was appealing, if only because he would be near her. But how could she teach a child who was so plainly already beyond her abilities? And the option of sending him away in elementary school didn't bear consideration. So, she simply encouraged him to read, and his teachers did the same. He had been advanced through the grades early and was poised to start high school in the fall. But even their local high school would be child's play for Will. She had a difficult decision to make, and she had to make it soon. Perhaps it was time to let him go. Perhaps this was all she could do with her love for her son. She knew instinctively that he was somehow destined for a future she couldn't understand. Her job as his mother was to help him fly, wasn't it? She finished her meal in silence, as she surreptitiously contemplated her son.

After dinner, Gwen began to clear the table, and said, "Will, could you help me tonight?" She felt Jack cast her a knowing look, saw his nod, and accepted his "good night, Gwen," as he headed for the door. As the sound of the latch clicked loudly in the ensuing silence, Gwen set her armload of dishes on the counter, and said to Will, "I need to tell you something, Will."

Will froze, holding a handful of silverware in one hand and an almost-empty bowl of mashed potatoes in the other. He looked at her, uneasy for some reason he could not yet understand. "What is it, Mom?"

"Fifteen years ago, your father and I found out that I was pregnant." She looked at Will, whose eyebrows had drawn together in confusion.

"You … had a child?" he asked her.

"No … that baby … I miscarried." She met his eyes, accepting the compassion she saw written in them. Will felt the depth of the sadness in her eyes as if it were his own. He gave himself a moment by turning to put the silverware in the sink before sitting back in his chair and meeting her eyes again. She went on, "The doctors told me that I would never carry a baby to term. I wanted a baby so badly, and so did your father. I became so sad, that I could barely get from day to day. Your father brought up the idea of adopting a baby, and the idea seemed so perfect, that I could hardly wait to apply."

Will looked steadily at his mother. She seemed distressed about what she had to tell him. "Are you trying to tell me that I'm adopted, Mom?"

"I … yes." She looked beseechingly at him, willing him to understand. Her worries were wasted. Will stood and came to her, looking her straight in the eye, his height matching hers. She was snagged by the jeweled beauty of his eyes and his serenity momentarily became hers. He laid his hands on his mother's strong shoulders.

"Mom. I love you. I don't care if you found me in the rain barrel. You _are_ my mother, however that came to be. Did you think I would love you less?" Will pulled his mother to him and hugged her hard. He felt the distance he had experienced momentarily lift between them. He felt her shaking against him, and pulled away. "Mom, please don't stress about this. I already knew."

"What?" Gwen looked horrified. "Who told you?"

Will flashed his mom a quick white grin, showing off the endearing imperfection of his slightly crooked front teeth. "Mom. No one told me, and I didn't know the details you just gave me, but I've read enough about genetics to know that I couldn't be yours and Dad's natural child. Look at me and tell me I have your genes! I'm as tall as you, at eleven. The tallest person on both sides of the family is Uncle Jim, and he's only 5 foot 5! By all measures, I'm on track to be over six feet tall! And look at my face! You have small even features, Dad had small features. I have full lips, these weird blue-green eyes, a cleft chin and what's up with this nose? My face is nothing like anyone else's in the family. I figured this out a couple of years ago. Don't stress! You _are_ my mother. I'm fine with this. Do you know anything about my birth parents at all?" Gwen looked at Will fearfully, as he segued into this question without warning. "Just curious, Mom."

"Well, all I know is that they were both quite intelligent. I was told that your father was an Oxford-educated psychologist who worked as a criminal profiler for the FBI, and your mother was some kind of doctor who also worked for the FBI.

"Wow. That sounds … different. Oxford-educated… is he English? Do they still work for the FBI?"

"I don't know. I just got that little bit of extra information, when I went back to the adoption agency to get some more background. I thought I should check when it turned out that you were so gifted. But it was a closed adoption, so that was all I could find out."

Will rolled his eyes. "Well, sounds like I come by my brains honestly enough. I was beginning to think I was some kind of mad scientist's genetic experiment. But, really Mom, anyone can probably come by brains and my kind of charming good looks by a genetic fluke, as well. What I got from you and Dad, that was more difficult. It took work. That's what matters." His uneven toothy grin made another appearance.

"What do you think you got from us, Will?" Gwen asked carefully, looking at him in apprehension.

"You taught me to be compassionate, kind, fair, to work hard, to stand up for the underdog, and to give everyone a fair chance. Dad taught me to give a girl a hug if she's upset, to look a person in the eye when you talk to him, to shake hands firmly, to pay attention to the truth, to never give up, and to make sure you choose something to stand for. I could list a lot more stuff, but you're already crying, so I'll stop. I love you, Mom, and it isn't going to change. Better get used to having to feed my rapacious teenage appetite. I think it's gonna start early." He paused thoughtfully. "You know, if I thought you were at all full of guile, I would suspect that you timed this announcement to get out of having to feed me as a teenager." He shot her his patented puppy-dog-eyed expression that always made her laugh, the intensity of his gaze muted by the silly look. Gwen smiled at him through her tears. This was her Will, his dry sense of humor was back, and he had momentarily lost the distance that had plagued the first two weeks of summer break.

"I have something else to talk to you about, too, Will. It's something I just this minute made my mind up about. I've been struggling with it for months, and I think I've made the right decision."

Will scowled. This sounded more dire than the first part of the conversation. "What is it, Mom? You and Dad are aliens, right?"

"Good guess, but not quite." He could always make her smile, even when she was stressed. "Do you remember last fall, when you did all of that testing to get into high school early?" She waited for his nod. "Well, I took that stuff and sent it off to several academies for exceptional students. Unsurprisingly, you were accepted at every one. I wasn't sure I could let you leave me. But it's time. Do you understand?" The tears were gathering in her eyes, and her voice broke, but she looked into the sea green of his eyes and knew that she had made the right decision.

"Mom?" Will felt tears sting his own eyes, forming at the thought of what this had cost her, and blinked them rapidly away. "Are you sure? I'm okay with staying here, you know."

"Will, you obviously have some destiny beyond what lies in store for you here. It's been clear since you came here. It's like we were only protecting you for a short time, letting you get old enough to go out and chase it down. It's time for you to fly." Her back was straight, and her shoulders were squared against the hurt to come from allowing him to go. Her voice had steadied. She believed her words with her whole heart. It was the only thing that could allow her to let him go.

"Where are these schools?" Maybe, he thought, they were close enough to visit a lot. She would be so lonely without him. She seemed so sure that it was right, but he wasn't there yet.

"The closest is in Seattle, and it also seems to be the best. It's called the Jackson Calhoun Science and Medical Magnet. It has a national reputation, and also has a program for younger students, where they can board with local families instead of in the dorms with the older kids. I checked into it pretty extensively …" She trailed off and sat down at the table again, looking out the window. Incongruously, she noticed that it had gotten completely dark outside. She watched her son, who had begun to pace back and forth in front of the window, muttering to himself.

"Take some time to think about it, Will. Don't decide right now. We'll talk about it again. Go help Jack." She stood and went to the sink to work on the dishes, and waited for him to leave.

The snick of the latch let her know he had gone, and she let the tears finally fall unchecked. She had had such a short time with this extraordinary person, her son. But he had to go. She knew that, and it wasn't forever. She couldn't be selfish. She wouldn't let herself be selfish; she was his mother.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

_Bainbridge Island, Washington State_

The slight breeze caught at the wet sunflower seed husk, and twirled it around in a graceful dance before depositing it gently near the others among the yellow-green blades of over-long grass. The lawn sloped smoothly towards an obvious transition point where man stopped fighting nature and lawn became wild grasses. Beyond the narrow expanse of wild grasses, the beach began. It wasn't a beach like people imagined beaches to be. There wasn't even much sand, and the sand that was there was a rich dark mixture. The grasses graded into rough black volcanic stones that were marked with bird droppings, lichens and slimy beach plants. Here and there, limpets clung to their surfaces. These stones became smaller as they approached the water, until they were fine pebbles at the water line. As they became smaller, different colors were mixed in, and the surfaces became smoother. Broken pieces of oyster shells, brownish agates, and red bits of hematite were part of the generally dark color of the beach. The paltry amount of sand was there at the edge, too, blending well with the dark stones. The surf was gently racing back and forth up the beach, making a sound like a rain-maker, as the pebbles rolled against each other. Chunks of sea vegetation lay scattered everywhere, and gave the air a pungent smell. A seagull hopped from rock to rock, eyeballing every patch of color to decide on edibility. Some patches warranted a peck or two, and unwary crabs became appetizers. Everything was freshly washed by the latest rain, but that could be said for pretty much any point in time in the Pacific Northwest. There was barely time between rain showers for anything to become dusty. It was no wonder that Seattle's nickname was "The Emerald City."

Well, thought Fox Mulder as he sent another husk into the wind, even if there were no other truths, it was true that this part of the country was beautiful. And even now, at the end of October, it was pleasantly cool, with a late-season nip in the air this morning, instead of oppressively hot like he had seen on the news reports for the D.C. area, although he was assured that sunshine instead of rain was unusual. He wasn't sweating in his dark suit and loud tie, which had been status quo in D.C. The fresh breeze stirred his dark hair, encouraging an uncooperative silky lock to fall forward across his brow as usual. He ignored it as he studied the sky. It was an unreal shade of blue, with a few improbably white puffy clouds sailing around, making the whole scene look like a kindergarten finger painting. Mulder finished off the seeds in his mouth, winging the husks out to join the others, and turned back towards his house.

He was pleased with the house they had chosen here in the South Beach area of Bainbridge Island. It was far enough from Winslow to seem remote, but close enough to allow easy commuting times. The house blended with the scenery painlessly, with its cedar siding and wildly landscaped yard. The side facing Puget Sound was mostly windows, all the way up into the sharply peaked roof. It wasn't large, but they didn't need a lot of space. The windows to the outside world lent a spaciousness that made up for that anyway. The front of the house was set back from the road and protected by huge old rhododendron bushes that almost seemed to have morphed into trees. There was a gravel drive that wound from the road and ended neatly by a detached double garage. He had started back towards the patio, neatly furnished with an patio table and chairs, when a woman's voice reached his ears, sailing faintly on the slight wind.

"Mulder! Where are you?" It made him quirk a small smile. The words were imbued with a familiar impatience that never failed make him want to quicken his step. How did she do that? The woman had more inflections to her voice than anyone else he knew. Or maybe, he thought, I just recognize them from having spent most of the last two decades in her company.

"Yo," he replied laconically, perversely trying to irritate her further, and simultaneously repressing that urge to rush to her by taking lanky, unhurried steps.

"Mulder," she began in annoyed frustration. "What are you doing out here? We need to get going. I don't want to be late for the ferry!" Dana Scully looked, as always, the picture of complete professionalism, with her slim charcoal suit jacket, matching skirt, and high-heeled pumps. Her shining red hair stirred in the gentle breeze, and her lacy blouse would have been flirty if she had left just one more button undone. Mulder amused himself by unbuttoning it in his mind before he reached her. As soon as he was close enough, he reached out for it and flicked the top button open before she could do anything to ward his hand off.

"Beautiful morning, isn't it, Scully?"

She started to say his name again in annoyance, but caught his eye instead. The devilry lurking there heated her in ways she didn't need to be heated just before going to work, and she couldn't help remembering what the same look had led to the night before. As Mulder saw the answering heat in her eyes, he swooped in to capture her lips in a quick, careful kiss while she was still flustered, loving the thought that he could still reduce her to this state, even after being together for so long.

He waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively. "We still have plenty of time, Scully. If we left now, we would be almost an hour early, and then what would we do?" He danced back out of range of the quick, light right hook that was aimed at his shoulder. "Hey, I didn't even mess up your lipstick!"

"Get your ass in the car, Mulder, and stop trying to grope me." Scully's voice took on a tone that Mulder didn't often feel compelled to argue with, and he gave her a wide berth as he headed towards the car. Her diminutive stature didn't figure into the depth of his respect for her; it was her personal strength and "I can do anything" attitude that did it. Anyway, it was probable that she was carrying a concealed weapon, as she often did these days. Mulder respected that cop side of her still, although he only saw it when she was nervous or anxious about something. She had been practicing as a pediatrician for several years now, and didn't often feel the need to blast the crap out of things, but he knew from long hours at the shooting range that she was still a fine shot. She was actually better than he was, if he was going to be truthful about it. He rubbed his left shoulder in a gesture of respect for her skill.

"Geez, Dr. Scully-Mulder, give a guy a break! Ever since I married you, you've done nothing but abuse me." He shot her a kicked puppy look as he climbed into the driver's side that made her want to cuff him even more. But still, she smiled at the silly name he'd bestowed on her when they had married.

"Someone needs to abuse you to keep you in line, Mulder, and you know it." Scully slid with athletic grace into the passenger's side of the dark gray sedan and swung her legs in last, settling her rich brown leather briefcase in front of her knees. She had already buttoned her blouse up to a respectable level, Mulder noted with some disappointment. She fastened her seatbelt and then, tapping her fingers repeatedly on the handles, she looked across at the beloved face. It sported many more scars and lines than the youthfully unlined and undamaged one he had presented to her in his basement office in Washington D.C. so very long ago. She took note of the silver strands that were making their presence known in the thick dark brown hair at his temples. "Thank you for going with me to do this today. You don't have to, you know." Her voice was warm as she met his eyes.

"Sure, Scully, anything for you." He paused, looking pointedly at her fidgeting hands. "Except maybe for any more coffee this morning. I think you've exceeded the national safety limits." He flung this at her as he put the car in drive and guided it smoothly down the sloped driveway towards the road. Glancing both ways, he barely paused as he entered the roadway.

"You're going to get a ticket doing that, someday," she said sanctimoniously. "I'm probably going to have to say 'I told you so,' because I won't be able to stop myself." She glanced restlessly at her watch and squirmed impatiently in her seat, ignoring his comment about her jitters. "Where are your materials, Mulder?"

"Did I need materials?" The lazy comment had the intended effect on his wife.

Scully tipped her head back and bumped it several times against the headrest in familiar exasperation with her partner's cavalier attitude towards his job. She felt her newly shortened cinnamon-colored hair brush against her neck and reached up to tuck a strand behind her ear. She sighed out loud, started bouncing her knee, and looked over at Mulder.

"You have been invited to a career fair at a nationally recognized high school for gifted kids, and you have no materials." She made it a statement, because she already knew it was true.

Mulder looked at her bouncing knee, reached over and pushed down on it, which stilled it only until he released it. "Scully, you know that I was only included to get you to come to the fair. I'm not really science, and I'm not really medical, so I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do, anyway. I'll probably just back you up, as usual. I brought some files with me to work on, and if someone gets bored with all of you stiff-necked science types and wants to know about psychology, criminal profiling, private investigating, federal investigating, or even alien conspiracies, I will be happy to chat with him."

"Or her," Scully insisted perversely, mostly because he was ticking her off.

"Or her," he added agreeably.

Scully sighed again, knowing she couldn't win against someone who wouldn't fight with her. Sometimes, it would just be so satisfying to go a few rounds with the guy, but she could hardly ever get him going. His talent was in disarming her with his odd dry humor; it was his most effective weapon. He never lost his temper with her, like she had seen him do with suspects, like she had seen him do with himself. Deep inside, where she knew he wouldn't see, she smiled to herself, and admitted that she loved this simply complicated man a little more today than she had done yesterday. Putting her hand over his on the console, she let him see the smile.

Glancing at her, Mulder raised his eyebrow at her quizzically, and wondered about the smile. It held a typical amount of Scully-mystery, and kept him guessing about her thoughts, like every other smile she had ever shot his way. He brought her hand up to lay his lips against, inhaled the scent of her, and released her hand to steer around a corner.

Mulder felt his cell phone vibrate unexpectedly in the breast pocket of his suit, and because it surprised him with its violence, he swore succinctly, "Son of a bitch." Pulling it out, he checked the caller ID before answering it. It was his part-time secretary, Marilyn, who was a bossy, irreverent older woman with a prodigious talent for keeping his private investigation firm organized, despite his best efforts to sabotage her at every turn. He flipped the phone open, dividing his attention dangerously between his conversation and his driving.

"Mulder."

"Hey, Mulder, I got a call this morning that you might want to return before it gets too late. It was from that FBI guy that you talk about all the time. Walter Skinner." Her strong Arkansas accent flowed out of the phone into his ear. "He sounded all hot and bothered, like a half-screwed red fox in a forest fire. But he wouldn't say what he wanted, exactly. That is one damned suspicious son-of-a-bitch. Sexy phone voice, though. I have his phone number." This all came out at high speed, as if she were a telemarketer who was paid by how many words she spoke each minute. She reeled Skinner's number off, too fast to write down even if he hadn't been driving. Mulder didn't need it, though; it hadn't changed. He shook his head at his secretary's colorful language and delivery. She was an attention-grabbing package, his secretary. She was an ex-biker chick, rumored to have owned a biker bar years earlier. Her appearance was striking, with her frightening bleached hair, a dizzying array of tattoos, (some of which Mulder didn't even want to imagine), and about three hundred pounds on a 5'3" frame. She had shown him a photo of herself twenty years earlier, when she weighed less than a hundred pounds, but told him that when she stopped smoking, she substituted chocolates, figuring they were less dangerous to her heath than cigarettes. He was constantly on her case about keeping her speech professional when she was talking to clients, but her back-woods upbringing had been augmented by her years on the back of a Harley and running the rumored bar, and he was pretty sure he'd never break her of her tendency to pepper her speech with bawdy words and stories. He wasn't even sure she could tell the difference between appropriate and not.

"Yeah. Thanks, Marilyn. I'll give him a call. Anything else?"

"Nope, pretty quiet today."

"Okay, why don't you take the day off? I'm headed over to Seattle for the day to educate some kids about the existence of extraterrestrials and I'll be back to the office tomorrow."

"Wow. You are one fantastic boss. I was wondering when I could meet up with my new boyfriend and try out some of his kinky toys. Now I have all day."

Her twisted humor was something Mulder could relate to, and he laughed appreciatively, trying not to picture her doing anything of the sort. He advised her solemnly not to do anything he wouldn't, before he hung up on her. He refocused his attention on his driving, as they approached the Winslow ferry terminal and got in line at one of the toll booths.

Scully eyed him warily. "Your … erm …secretary?" The jury was still out, as far as Scully's opinion of his secretary was concerned. He decided not to mention Marilyn's little joke.

"Yeah. Guess who called, all worked up?" He thought he could drag out the time before he mentioned Skinner, because he knew exactly what her reaction would be. Skinner knew their home phone number, and called occasionally to shoot the breeze and catch up. This sounded different; Scully would catch on pretty quickly and jump to the inevitable conclusion of impending doom.

"No idea, Mulder. Why don't you just tell me? Something going on that I should know about?" She scowled steadily at the SUV in front of them, trying unsuccessfully to make the vanity plate make sense in her head. Why did people put such stupid things on their cars? They were a distraction and the bane of the English language. Besides, they made her mad when she couldn't figure them out.

"I don't know yet. It was Skinner. I'll have to call him back to get the low-down." He looked apprehensively at her out of the corner of his eye as they inched forward towards the booth. She had become very still, the change all the more noticeable after her jumpiness all the way from home this morning. He looked away and pulled up to pay for their passage on the ferry. He kept his gaze on the traffic attendant, and followed his directions to the proper lane to await the loading process. As he turned the key off, Scully's silence was emphasized by the clearly audible ticking of the cooling engine.

"What?" he was brave enough to ask her.

"Skinner." Suddenly urgent, she turned sideways in her seat to face him, intensity etched onto her face and in her gaze. "What could he want? We just chatted with him last week. Something must be going on for him to call you at work."

"I'll call him later, Scully. He can wait. Look, the ferry's here." His words were drowned out by the sounding of the ferry's fog horns, a common sort of eerie music around the Puget Sound, and they watched in silence as the vessel docked. The ferry had a blocky shape, with the gaping maw of the car decks taking up the lower two stories. Above the car decks were the two passenger decks, one lined with gleaming windows and the other open to the air, with two areas blocked off from the wind. The wheelhouse was stacked atop these decks, and the name plate on the front of this vessel read "Wenatchee." The deck hands looped massive ropes around enormous cleats, lowered the car ramps, and began to direct the unloading cars towards the correct lanes. The seagulls swooped around the front and sides of the ferry, looking for freshly disturbed edibles stirred up by the huge engines of the boat. Walking passengers waited patiently for the deck hands to swing the passenger bridge into place, before walking off of the ferry en masse towards the terminal. Fresh passengers took their place within moments.

Finally, the boat had emptied, and the ferry terminal workers pointed at two cyclists who were waiting to board. They rode towards the front of the boat, and then the lanes of waiting cars were pointed at in turn to drive aboard the glinting green and white ferry. Mulder concentrated on parking the car where he was directed, and then set the parking brake, turned the car off again, and looked at his partner. "Wanna go get some coffee?" He was determined to keep her mind off of Skinner as long as he could.

"I thought I was 86ed," Scully said ruefully.

He looked at her knee. "Yeah, well, looks like you've regained a bit of control. I think we can chance it. Anyway, I just want to go up on deck and enjoy the view."

Scully followed Mulder up the stairs from the car deck, already admiring the view ahead of her on the steep narrow gray stairs. When he turned suddenly on the landing, he caught her ogling his backside, and queried, "View pretty good?"

She blushed, shrugged an unconcerned shoulder and allowed, "Considering how old it is, not too bad."

Laughing at the insulting compliment, Mulder wrapped his arm around her shoulders and walked with her to a bench by one of the enormous windows. Without taking his arm away, he guided both of them into the seat and snuggled her close to his side, enjoying her warmth and familiar weight against him. They sat in companionable silence while the ferry's engines engaged and caused the boat to surge away from the terminal. They were both still new enough to the whole ferry-riding process, that it all seemed fascinating. As they pulled away from the shore, a pair of seagulls fell into precision formation next to their window and paced the ferry exactly, peering in the window at the pair of humans who peered out. One of the gulls cocked his head insolently at Mulder and made him laugh.

"I think that was a challenge, Mulder. Whatever will you do to preserve your honor among man-beasts?"

"I'm fairly secure in my manhood. I think I'll just let it pass."

Eventually, the birds got bored and peeled off in search of more interesting things to do. Scully and Mulder settled into a pleasant hypnotized state, and watched as the shores of the Puget Sound passed by. Fine glass-fronted houses flanked private beaches, and the overwhelming colors of the numerous fall flowering plants were intensely bright. Sailboats tacked lazily back and forth on the slightly rough blue water of the sound. Fishing boats made their way with purpose from point to point. Tiny people could be seen here and there beachcombing, playing, clamming, and looking for oysters. The half-hour trip passed uneventfully, and neither one were inclined to get up and brave the snack-bar coffee. The captain announced that they were approaching the Seattle terminal, and that all car passengers needed to return to the car deck.

The ferry trip had provided a welcome respite from thoughts of what Walter Skinner wanted, but thoughts of him returned to Scully's mind as she climbed back into the car with her characteristic grace. She let the suspicions bounce around in her mind as they completed the last leg of their journey to the Jackson Calhoun Science and Medical Magnet School, and then compartmentalized her thoughts neatly as they pulled into the parking lot.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Seattle, Jackson Calhoun Science and Medical Magnet

In the school gym, Mulder opted to sit with Scully at her booth, rather than sitting at his own empty table. He helped her spread some informational pamphlets around on her table, and then retreated to the second chair in the corner of the booth with one of the few files he had brought from his illegal X-file stash. He had been right, and they ended up arriving fairly early, with plenty of time to kill before the fair started. He refrained from mentioning this to Scully, with uncharacteristic self-control. Suddenly feeling as antsy as Scully had seemed earlier, Mulder stood and told his partner that he was going to look around. She had apparently expended her excess nervous energy and decided to stay at the table. As Scully watched her towering husband depart, she wondered how in the hell he was going to be able to hang around here all afternoon without going stir-crazy. Hopefully, someone would show up interested enough in extra-terrestrials to keep him busy. Mulder and "bored" did not mix well, she mused.

Looking around the gym, she took in the general ambiance. It smelled like the gym at her own high school and every high school across the nation. The smell took her back a million years. Okay, she grimaced, only 30, but still… The lights buzzed, and she guessed that was typical, too. The school colors, gray and red, predominated in the color scheme, and were displayed on the folded bleachers, the wall decorations, and the practice pads. Scully laughed at the poster on the wall that proclaimed, "We are the Jackson Calhoun Science and Medical Magnet Knights . . . who say NEE."

The school was supposed to have a pretty good basketball team, despite being populated with the geeks of the entire Pacific Northwest, as well as some from the west and Midwest. The winning pennants that were displayed proudly on the walls attested to that fact. Who said brilliant people had to be uncoordinated and bad at sports? Mulder was a prime example of that; he would have fit perfectly into this high school, back in his day. Mulling over what her husband would have been like in high school had her smiling and shaking her head. He was definitely good at basketball, but how well would he have gotten along with his peers? He would have been pretty fresh from the shock of losing his sister when he started high school.

She peered around at the other career fair participants. People were busily organizing booths all over the gym. All of the "thinking careers" were well-represented, as if every student at this high school were expected to go to college without questioning the idea. There wasn't a single booth dedicated to restaurant management, heavy equipment operation, or any of the trades. Scully supposed that, if they worked hard enough to get to this point, the only thing left would be to decide which Ivy League to attend. It was good to know that there were teens out there with lofty goals that they were willing to work hard to achieve.

Scully fidgeted a little more and then took some patient files and her laptop out of her briefcase and started working on some notes. Her private practice kept her fairly busy, and she often brought files home to finish entering into her computer. Her powers of concentration were well-honed from years of working in noisy, cluttered environments, and she was able to tune out the extraneous noise echoing around the large gym. Soon she was lost in the process of transferring notes to her computer. She barely registered Mulder's return, until the smell of a Chunky Monkey Latte drifted past her nose. Evidently, she was not as successful at tuning out olfactory input.

Closing her eyes, she moaned, "Mmmmmm… is that for me?"

"Go get your own, G-woman."

"Mulder, that's downright cruel. How do you know I'm not armed?"

Mulder wasted no time handing one of the two lattes over to the petite redhead, suspecting that she would stop at nothing, not even spousal homicide, to get at it. Not one for empty threats, Scully must always be taken seriously. He felt vaguely safer as she took the first slurp.

"Thank you, Mulder," she conceded politely. "Who knew you'd turn out to be such a thoughtful husband?"

Mulder grunted out a perfunctory acknowledgement of his virtue, although his attention had been drawn to the gym doors. "Looks like the rug-rats are arriving. Are you ready?"

"If they disturb my latte, I might have to shoot someone."

"I'll cover for you 'til you finish, if it will keep you out of prison." Mulder allowed. "Didn't you know that it's illegal to carry concealed weapons on school property?"

Scully glared at him. "I'm a licensed private eye, just like you, Mulder. There are exceptions to every rule." This, self-righteously, from a woman who prided herself on playing by the rules. She slurped some more Chunky Monkey, closing her eyes and moaning softly in appreciation.

Sweet Jesus, Mulder thought, shifting uncomfortably as he watched his wife enjoy her latte, and almost moaning himself as the tip of her tongue zipped over her full lips to catch a bit of whipped cream. Nervously, he glanced at the approaching throngs of students, and hoped they didn't notice her blatant sensual enjoyment of her coffee or his blatant carnal reaction. But he needn't have worried. Her transformation to quintessential professional had him marveling as the first student paused uncertainly at the table to sift through the information lying there. He shook his head, and took a sip of his own coffee.

Fairly certain now that there would be no immediate carnage, he relaxed back into his chair and watched her earnestly discuss becoming a doctor with a girl who could have been 13 years old. Scowling, he wondered about that. Who decides to be a doctor at 13 years old? Wasn't this supposed to be a high school? How old were high school kids, anyway? 15? 16? He glanced around the crowd, noticing that there were a number of kids milling around that didn't even seem to have entered puberty yet. Gifted kids, I guess, Mulder mused. He, himself, had graduated early, at 16, but he hadn't started early. He just cruised through quicker than most, by taking more than his share of required courses simultaneously and picking up college courses on the side, simply hungry for knowledge.

Suddenly, his attention snagged on a leggy kid who moved with the implausibly confident grace of a young leopard. Something was hauntingly familiar about him, Mulder thought, watching lazily as the casually-dressed boy drifted from table to table, intensely centered on whichever person he happened to be talking to. He was one of the younger ones, maybe 13 years old, judging by his height. But he seemed oddly focused on gathering information from the various guests, despite his young age. His enthusiasm was amazing to behold. He looked like a kid in a candy store. The boy's hair was a deep rich chestnut color that flashed auburn when the lights caught it, and it fell untidily across his brow, the cut of it giving him the look of a budding English polo player. His face was constructed of elegant planes, giving him a classically handsome face, but one which was a work in progress. Boy and man existed there together, and there was some kind of exotic appeal to the kid's face that Mulder couldn't pinpoint. He watched as the kid interacted animatedly with a pair of older students, and felt another twinge of familiarity when he grinned at the two.

Abruptly, the kid turned, as if sensing Mulder's unwarranted attention on him. The direct look he shot at Mulder was one of curiosity and interest. The two of them locked eyes across an expanse of gym floor, booths, milling kids and teachers, and Mulder almost choked. Scully's eyes! Scully's eyes were staring at him out of that kid's face, and Mulder felt his world contract almost to a pinpoint. Unable to get a good breath into his lungs, he stood hastily, almost knocking the chair over behind him. He put both hands against his diaphragm and gave himself an order, as he pushed in on his abdomen. Breathe in, he told himself. Breathe out. Get a grip, Mulder. There had to be an explanation. Hoping it wasn't the explanation that immediately came to mind, Mulder stood there gawping, locked in a stare-down with a strange kid. His mind was silently screaming, "is the cloning project still in progress?"

By now, Will had noticed Mulder's odd reaction and was scowling. Will stood there, unsure. What the heck? Why was this guy staring him down and going pale in the face? There was something vaguely familiar about the guy's face. Did he know the guy from somewhere? Someone in the large crowd of jostling students bumped his elbow, and he reacted instantly according to his karate training by turning and assuming a ready stance, knees slightly bent, hands up and ready. He knew even as he whirled that there was no danger, and he came out of the stance as quickly as he has assumed it. He must be on edge because of the staring man. He turned to look for the man again, but the contact had been broken. The guy was bent over next to a petite red-headed woman, whispering urgently in her ear. Will put the incident out of his mind as he turned back to the engineer he was waiting to interrogate.

Behind him, across the aisle, Mulder was whispering to Scully urgently, "Scully! Look at that kid over there!"

Scully impatiently waved him away from her ear as if he were an annoying insect, and continued to talk to the teenager in front of her. "No, you don't have to major in 'pre-med' to get into a good medical school. I majored in physics. You should aim for some kind of hard science, though, and make sure you cover all of the pre-requisite classes. Here's a general list."

The teen took the list, and considered her statement seriously. "I'm really interested in chemistry. I'm thinking I would make a better medical researcher than a doctor who works with patients. What path would I take to pursue that kind of a career?" Scully looked the boy over. He seemed awkward and geeky, not overly confident with his social skills, but quite intelligent. Mulder's tug on her elbow distracted her again and she peeled his fingers away.

"Chemistry makes a great undergrad degree for medicine," she agreed readily. Mulder was now poking at her shoulder with two fingers and she surreptitiously shoved them away, using one of her self-defense moves to make sure that it hurt. "Then, as you make your way through medical school, you should focus your rotations on the research fields if that's … " Poke, poke. She finally snapped and rounded on her increasingly infuriating husband. "Mulder, for God's sake, stop grabbing and poking me! I am trying to talk to people here. What is _wrong_ with you?" This was delivered in a whispered growl and accompanied by the kind of blazing look that made Mulder back up a few feet in respect.

"Sorry, Scully. It's just that … Well, I saw … uh, this kid over there. And he …"

"Go take a break, Mulder. Let me work. This kind of help, I didn't need!" Accompanied as this directive was by a pointed look that promised no end of pain if he didn't obey, Mulder decided that a bit more space would be prudent and backed away some more. She turned her back on him again, intending to continue her conversation with the geeky aspiring medical researcher, but found that he had left, probably in fear. She sighed and turned back to confront Mulder, only to find that he had slipped out of the back of the booth, possibly also in fear. She shook her head in exasperation and then took advantage of his absence and the lack of students to take another swallow of her cooling latte.

Glancing around to check on any waiting students, she was astounded to spy Mulder in full private eye mode out in the middle of the crowd. There were plenty of tall kids in the crowd, but it took no effort to find him there. It was entirely obvious to her that he was tailing someone, but only because she had witnessed him in this role for two-thirds of her adult life. Hell, she had spent half of her adult life in stake-out mode _with_ the man. She stood there staring at him with her mouth hanging open, flabbergasted. Who the hell was he tailing in a school for gifted kids? Overcoming her mental paralysis, she started looking around the gym, trying to identify his target, but it was impossible with so many milling bodies. Practicing, maybe? Shaking her bowed head, she re-focused on her table, and saw that she had a small queue of kids piled up, looking at her curiously.

"Oh. Uh, sorry. I was just looking around to see what other professions were represented here today." Scully switched gears from private eye to doctor quickly as she began to answer the questions lobbed at her by the inquisitive group of kids before her. They seemed to be all ages, from pre-pubescent to late teens. Some of the older ones were dressed in interviewing garb, probably at the behest of some counselor, and everyone else was dressed in casual jeans and t-shirts. She fielded questions about pathology, pediatrics, undergraduate programs, the best medical schools, financing a medical training program, and a few other topics. When one teen asked if she had always been a pediatrician, she fumbled around a bit before admitting that she had spent the first nine years of her medical career as a FBI agent and government-sanctioned pathologist. This led to astonished outbursts, excited chattering, and a whole new round of questions about what kinds of things she had done in _that_ exciting career. And, _why_, for God's sake, would anyone ever leave such a job?

Glancing around, desperately seeking a way out of this line of questioning, she noticed a serious boy's face that seemed to stand out in the blurred crowd of adolescent faces. She focused on his face in confusion, wondering how she knew this kid. One of her patients? His eyes looked familiar, but his whole face struck a chord in her, so much so that she lost her train of thought as her mind snagged on the task of identifying the familiarity. Mumbling something to the group about taking a bit of a break, she answered a few more quick questions as the crowd faded away from her, disappointed by her inattention. Suddenly, only the kid in the back was left before her. As Mulder came up behind him, it was all of a sudden agonizingly clear. With an almost audible crash, the realization hit her: the kid had Mulder's face. From the cowlick in the front of his hair to the cleft in his chin, this kid was a smaller, younger version of her partner, her best friend, her husband. Scully felt her field of vision contracting, blacking out her sight, and the noises around her suddenly seemed strangely clear and high-pitched, and then she saw nothing. Mulder leapt forward to catch her as she fell, and then carried her quickly back behind the curtain that made up the back of the booth. He laid her carefully on the floor and rubbed at her wrists.

Scully slowly came back to consciousness, aware only that Mulder's voice filled her whole existence as he leaned over her, gently stroking her cheeks. "Scully? Scully? Come on, sweetheart, wake up for me." As her eyes fluttered open, he sighed with relief and smiled at her, falling back on his sense of humor to say "Hey – c'mon, get up. You're embarrassing me, here!"

"What – what happened?" she felt weak, confused.

"You fainted. I carried you back here, so no one would find your gun."

"You're hysterical, Mulder. Help me sit up. I need some water."

"Got it." He helped her sit up and handed her a bottle of water that he grabbed out of one of her boxes of materials.

Suddenly, Scully remembered what she had seen. Her crystal blue-green eyes widened at the memory. "Mulder … that boy! Did you see him? He looked …"

"I know, Scully. I tried to tell you. He has your exact eyes," he said grimly. "I think they must still be cloning."

She stared at him, shaking her head vigorously back and forth, saying brokenly, "No, no … Mulder, no! It isn't that. That kid was … I saw it immediately when you walked up beside him. Oh, my God, Mulder, it's . . .it's William! It's our son! You only saw him as a newborn, before his eyes changed colors. But when you came up beside him, he was like a carbon copy of you, except for his eyes! It's William! We have to find him! Help me up!"

Mulder was gaping at Scully as she blurted this all out, and although he moved to help her, it was like moving through honey instead of air. The possibility of what she was saying stunned him. His head was moving back and forth in a slow negative. He felt each movement as a desperate strain on every muscle fiber in his body, time stretched into something approaching infinity, and then his field of vision closed in to include only Scully's eyes, their intensity searing into him as if he were looking straight into the sun. It felt as though her eyes were his only tether to the surface of the planet. He struggled to understand.

"William …?"

"Go see if he's still there. Find him, Mulder, please!" she gasped. It was her helpless pleading that spurred him on. She so seldom pleaded for anything, that he was willing to go to the ends of the earth for her when she did. He stood painfully, still reeling from her assertions that the child was William. Surely this kid was too old. Mulder stumbled through the curtain and met those familiar eyes in what he now recognized as his own face startlingly combined with Scully's, waiting patiently at the table in their booth. The kid rose from the chair fluidly and stepped forward. Mulder couldn't take his eyes off of Will's face. He tried to breathe. It sounded very loud and very fast in his own ears.

"Is she alright? It looked like you managed to catch her. She didn't hit her head or anything, did she?"

"Uh … " Mulder croaked, and then tried again. "No. No, she's okay. She wants to see you. Is your name … " Mulder couldn't say the name and blinked to clear his vision, but he couldn't break the contact with the boy's eyes. "What's your name, son?"

"My name? It's Will Van de Kamp. I just started school here. I was listening to the doctor talk about her experiences in the FBI, and I was just curious. I … I don't know her. I don't know you, do I? You look a little familiar, but…"

"My name is Fox Mulder. The doctor's name is Dana Scully. Why were you curious about the FBI?"

"Well … it's kind of strange, actually. I just found out this summer that … well, that's not right, really, I guess I just had my suspicions confirmed by my mother that I was adopted. When I asked about it, she said all she knew was that my parents were both very accomplished. She thought that my father was some kind of criminal profiler in the FBI, and that he might be British, because he went to Oxford. And she said my birth mother was a doctor in the FBI, which I thought was strange, because I didn't know the FBI had doctors. But then when Dr. Scully was talking about her experiences, I thought maybe it wasn't such a strange thing to be a doctor in the FBI, and I was going to ask her about it. Then she fainted."

During this speech, Mulder found that his legs would no longer hold him upright, and he sat down abruptly on one of the chairs. Passing his hand over his face roughly, he couldn't say a word. He kept staring and shaking his head, trying to understand. He forced out, "You're too old. It can't be. How old are you, Will?"

Puzzled, Will said, "I'm too old for what? I'm eleven. My birthday is in May."

"Yes, it is," said Scully softly, coming up behind Mulder. "You were born in Georgia, in the abandoned town of Democrat Hot Springs, with another FBI agent as a midwife, because our lives were in danger from some very desperate people. Your father," as she glanced at Mulder, she laid her hand on his shoulder, "showed up out of the blue and rescued us all from being kidnapped."

"What?" Bewilderment and disbelief colored the boy's face.

Scully looked steadily towards the boy, and he started to understand. He raised his hand to his face and traced the cleft in his chin, looked at Mulder's chin, at his nose, at his lips and hair. His gaze skipped to Scully and he met her eyes with identical ones of his own. "Oh, my God," he said. "You're … you were my birth parents. Oh, my God." He sat abruptly on the other chair, mirroring Mulder's posture unconsciously. His hands now scrabbled at his jeaned knees, and he stared again at Mulder's features. "Statistically speaking… meeting you here is… highly improbable." At this barefaced echo of past Scullyisms, Mulder started to laugh.

Then he felt Scully's hand grip his left shoulder and her body lean into his, as she whispered, "William." He could tell that she wanted to launch herself at the boy, but restrained herself to keep from frightening him away. She kept Mulder between herself and Will and her tension turned to a slow, steady fall of tears that landed with warm splats on her hand and his shoulder. He reached up with his right hand and placed it over hers on his shoulder. Tears landed on his hand, tiny little packages of unbearable pain and a desperate attempt at self-control. The slight comfort he offered seemed mournfully inadequate to him, after all that she had lost in her life, mostly because of him. Guilt flooded his body and he felt weakened again. As the sounds around the gym penetrated his consciousness, he realized irrelevantly that the career fair was continuing around them, even as their tiny portion of the universe shifted and twisted, never to be the same. Everything happening outside of the small bubble encompassing them seemed unreal and immaterial.

Will looked from one to the other and said quietly, "Judging by how emotional you are at finding me, I take it that there was a compelling reason to give me up for adoption."

"Oh, William! I did it to protect you! I couldn't keep you safe! During our work in the FBI, we worked on projects that made us some very powerful enemies who were not at all above using an innocent baby for their own agenda, part of which was to kill your father. He went into hiding, looking for some way, any way, to get them out of our lives. My sister was killed by them; Mulder's father was murdered, and his mother and sister died as a result of the actions of these people. One of them made it all the way to you, and could have harmed you badly, all because I couldn't keep you safe. You were even kidnapped once, and were gone for several days. I loved you so much! Part of me died inside when I gave you up. They would have found us, even in a witness protection program. They _were_ the government!" Scully's tears were falling in earnest, now, and she had stepped forward, past Mulder, her hand raised to Will beseechingly. It broke Mulder's heart to see her in such pain. Her pain must have struck a chord with the child, too, because he stood and put his hand into hers and gripped it, eyes reflecting concern, empathy, and unshed tears for this woman he didn't remember, but who obviously loved him so much.

"This is so crazy," the boy said, still holding onto Scully's hand and slowly shaking his head back and forth. "Things like that don't really happen. You're talking about some kind of James Bond movie. Or Mission Impossible or something!"

Mulder looked at Scully, and their torturous years of working in the X-files, which they both believed so far behind them, passed between them in a single Einsteinian moment of relativistic lucidity.

"Yeah," said Mulder heavily. "Seemed like it at the time, too." He paused, looking at the boy, preparing himself to hear the answer to the question that Scully was afraid to ask. "Did you … were you placed with good parents?" Scully's pale face swiveled to him, wounded eyes stabbing him accusingly, all of her hopes shining around the edges, all of her fears swirling in the middle. Holding her gaze was too excruciating to bear, and he dropped his in self-defense, praying that Will's answer was a gift to her, not a burden.

Will's answer was immediate and unequivocal. "My parents are the best a kid could have. My father was a rancher, but he died three years ago, and I miss him a lot. But he taught me to settle for nothing but the truth, to work hard and to never give up. My mother lives in Wyoming still, and she is the kindest, most wonderful mom I could have hoped for. She taught me to give everyone a chance to prove themselves to you before you judge them. If your intention was to keep me safe because you loved me, you succeeded." He hesitated. "My mother was afraid to tell me that I was adopted, but I figured it out quite a while ago. I told her that it didn't matter to me, because she was the mother who raised me. I love her." This was delivered a little defiantly, and his chin came out like Scully's did when she wasn't going to budge, but then his eyes met Scully's again, and he felt a little guilty.

"Oh, William, of course you love her! I love her too, for taking such good care of you, for keeping you safe and for bringing you up to be such a wonderful person. You have no idea how happy I am to hear that you were placed with loving people." The fear had flown from her eyes, and purest joy was lighting her face. She smiled at Will through the tears. "Can we …spend a little time with you, get to know you?"

"Dr. Scully, I would be honored to get to know you and Mr. Mulder, but I want to discuss it with my mother first. The last thing in the world that I want to do is to hurt her. I want to assure her that I'm not replacing her in any way." Maturity beyond his years colored his words, and he experienced a sudden prescience that, whatever purpose his mother thought awaited him, these two people were somehow going to be involved.

"You go by Will, huh?" asked Scully wistfully. "You can call me Scully. And you can just call him Mulder. He doesn't like to be called Mister."

Will smiled at them and said, as he nodded at each in turn, "Scully, Mulder, it's great to meet you guys. I'll bet you can tell me some stories, huh?"

Mulder couldn't take his eyes off of his son. "Well, we could, but then we'd have to kill you…" and winced as Scully jabbed him with unnecessary force between the ribs, before laughing with Will at Mulder's stale joke.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Seattle

Mulder finally stirred and glanced uneasily at Scully. They were still sitting in their car, although the ferry they had boarded had left the terminal ten minutes earlier. Their car occupied the first spot in one of the middle lanes of parking on the car deck and they had an incomparable view out of the front of the ferry, like front-row seats at the ballet. Neither of them noticed a single detail about that view, however, since the pair had been so lost in their individual thoughts. Scully was gazing far out into nothingness, unmoving, and Mulder wondered if he, too, had that shell-shocked look etched into his features. He reached gingerly for his wife's hand, and was dismayed to feel how still and cold it was. She allowed him this, or perhaps didn't notice.

"Scully …" he said in a thin, papery voice that he didn't recognize. "Talk to me, please."

She looked at him in surprise, as if just realizing that she was not alone in the car. "Our son, Mulder. We found him. Or, or he found us." Her eyes looked bruised in her white face, huge and still unfocused.

"We found each other." As Mulder let himself fall into the ocean of her eyes, she squeezed his hand, and both of them drew on the strength that was inherent in their connection. She clutched at his hand, and he gave up some of his warmth for her. Drawing her into him, he settled her bright head against his chest, ignoring the console jabbing his ribs. Stroking her hair gently with his free hand, he both absorbed from and added to their unique combined intensity until he felt able to speak normally again.

"You know that I love you, Scully." He knew that she did. He just needed to say this to her, more for himself than to remind her.

"Oh, Mulder, I never doubt that, ever. I consider that the one indestructible truth we have." Her words hummed against his chest, muffled by his jacket.

Mulder held her tighter and said, "You seem so … sad."

"Sad? No. Well, yeah, maybe, for missing his life. But really, what I'm feeling is completely sucker-punched, overwhelmed by the astronomical odds against our meeting him like this, at random. I couldn't even figure the odds on that. Could this even_ be_ random? Especially _now?_ Especially this year?" She couldn't begin to stem the flow of her tirade. The words came like an oil gusher, uncontrollable and dangerous. "How many predictions have we been exposed to concerning this very year, concerning our son's connection to this thing that's supposed to be happening? How did it read? The date is set?" Scully spoke into his chest, rolling her head back and forth on him in terror. "How could I even think that I could keep him safe by hiding him? How could I think that he couldn't be found? I should have kept him with me. With us! God, Mulder! I'm not ready for this! Can we even hope to understand? All this time, I just put it in the back of my mind, hoping …" Her despair washed over him, almost drowning him.

"Random is still a possibility. We don't know that this is what our meeting is about."

"Don't we? Do you, of all people really believe that? You've never believed _any_ coincidence is without meaning!" Scully pulled back from him to search his eyes, knowing already that he didn't believe his statement any more than she did. "I _am_ sad. But mostly, I'm terrified. What should we do? How much should we tell him?"

"Scully, don't you think that if he's involved, the information he needs will come to him?" He tried to comfort her with his calm muddy-river eyes, but he could see she wasn't buying it. He had to hold it together for both of them; he couldn't let himself feed off of her fear.

"What if it's supposed to come from us? Jesus, Mulder, this is so hard to get my mind around." Panic laced the edges of her eyes, turning the normally clear blue-green color cloudy as they darted around the car. Mulder reached out to steady her chin and to draw her gaze into his again.

"It will happen just as it will, and I don't think we have the power to do anything. We never have." His attitude shocked her into a stillness that his gaze had been unable to achieve. Should they hang their hopes on fate? Didn't that fly in the face of what they had always worked against? Did they dare to really believe that there was something bigger than them out there, working in the favor of humanity? Or would they have to fight for the right to exist, to control this planet? Whatever happened to their belief in the feats of extraordinary individuals? Or was it all really just Darwinian, just survival of the fittest? Innumerable questions slapped at her mind, beating it raw with their persistence. Mulder watched the progression of emotions chase each other through her eyes: from panic to realization, from realization to confusion, from confusion to incomprehension, and from incomprehension to numbness. He wanted to swallow his last words, but it was too late. "Scully …"

The serene blue of the sky, the stark green of the shoreline, the bright colors of late-season sailboats, and the slight chop of the Puget Sound waters flew past unnoticed by the pair in the first car. Their intensity was exclusive, and they seemed completely unaware of being observed. The man who observed them knew that the gloom of the car deck would have obscured his face from them even if they had been at their most alert, but he was glad for their mutual absorption all the same. It had been so long since this pair was of any significance, but things were heating up, as was evidenced by the unexpected meeting between them and their son this morning.

Mulder was still holding Scully's gaze when she noticed a change in his eyes. She had seen that particular wariness enough over the past two decades to have no doubts about what it meant. Her own eyes suddenly registered concern, and Mulder knew he'd been made.

"What?" Scully asked in alarm, without looking away.

"A feeling. Don't start looking around. Someone is watching us." For his part, Mulder's demeanor was suddenly tenser as he felt the fight or flight response start to kick in. He felt Scully's tenseness grow to match his own, and saw the keenness in her gaze as the same survival hormones took over her body. She made herself relax against him, and put her forehead to his, closing her eyes. She breathed him in for courage and tried to stay relaxed, like they were simply a couple immersed in each other.

"Mulder," she whispered brokenly. "I don't think I can do this again. I'm not strong enough."

"You are. _We are._ You know we're strong together. You know it. We can do this." His voice vibrated deeply with the intensity of his conviction. He ran his hand gently up and down her strong back, just to enhance the connection. He felt her life force giving him courage, and completed the circle for her. "Let them try their damnedest."

A change in the sound of the engines and the sudden sounding of the foghorn reminded them that they were on the ferry and nearing the terminal. Looking as one towards the front of the ferry, they could see that their escape from the boat was moments away. Scully straightened in her seat and fixed her gaze on the giant pilings that would guide the boat to the correct spot. A white seagull was parked on the top of one, clicking his beak at the boat, and Scully was suddenly reminded of the seagulls in the kid's movie _Nemo,_ who fought over tidbits of food, yelling, "Mine, mine," in Australian accents. She laughed ruefully at the memory, wondering how many times the scene had played in her office waiting room for kids waiting to see her. Mulder glanced at her questioningly, and she just shook her head sadly at him, without explaining. What would happen to their carefully constructed lives, lives that they had decided to live in the light instead of the darkness, in happiness instead of fear, in hope and denial instead of acceptance of what would turn out to be inevitable after all?

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

"Mom."

"Oh my God. Oh my God." This was followed by a frantic panting sound, and the faint sound of Jack's indistinct deep tones in the background.

"MOM." She finally stopped repeating the same phrase into his ear via the receiver he held there tightly. He waited.

"Will, do you believe these people?" Her fear came at him, crawling through the phone line like some living beast, and Will could think of no way to calm her. He was beginning to be sorry that he had given her this news on the telephone.

"Mama," he fell back on the baby name he had for her, the one he used when one or both of them was scared. He tried logic. "Why would they have any reason to deceive me? They were invited by the school to come to the fair, so they must have legitimate credentials. And Dr. Scully actually fainted when she saw me. It was no act, believe me. If Mulder hadn't caught her, she might have really gotten hurt when she fell. Besides, I look just like Mulder, and have Scully's eyes. They can't be lying." He felt his bed behind his knees and sat down slowly.

Gwen hesitated. "I … You … You said they asked to spend time with you? What does that mean, son?" Insecurity came with the words into his ear and wrapped itself tightly around his heart.

"Nothing, Mama. _You_ are my mother. Do you think I shouldn't do it?" He admitted to himself that he really wanted to know these two people, and again had the inescapable sense that they would be involved in his future, whether he wanted them to be or not. It seemed prudent to gain some insight into what they were about. "Do … do _you_ want to meet them, too?"

This hadn't occurred to Gwen, and it gave her pause. _Did _she want to meet these people who gave their son to strangers? On the one hand, she wanted to fall at their feet and worship them for giving her the opportunity to raise the son she couldn't bear herself. But on the other hand, they gave their _son_ away! "Uh. I suppose I should, at some point, if you're going to do this."

"What do you think, Mom?" he asked her again, putting the ball in her court and scooting back to lean against the headboard while hugging his pillow to his chest for comfort.

"I won't say that you can't. I want you to make your own decision about it, and to make sure you do it in a safe place, if you decide to. At the school, or in a public place, like a restaurant or mall. Do you think the school would give you information about them?"

"They already have. They confirmed that they were both in the FBI, that Scully is a pediatrician on Bainbridge Island, and that they both hold Private Investigator's licenses in the states of Washington and Virginia. He has a private practice, where he specializes in cases that are the other side of strange, ones that other people won't take."

"Strange cases? Dangerous ones?" Her fear ramped up again, and travelled down the line to him.

"I don't know, Mom. They didn't say. The school didn't seem to have any fear of either one of them, although they were curious about why I was interrogating them. I expressed my curiosity about the opportunity to become a doctor and an FBI agent at the same time." Will picked at a thread that was escaping his bedspread, surprised when it zipped out a foot with his slight tug. "Whoops."

"You lied?"

"Hardly. I am curious. It seems a strange career move, doesn't it?" Deciding to leave the thread alone, he plopped his pillow down over it and leaned over on the soft square, propping himself on one elbow.

"I suppose. It might be something to ask her about."

"Yeah. I think I'll meet up with them, at least once, and see what I find out. I'll call you to let you know when, and to let you know what happens when I get done."

"Are you keeping up with your school work?" Falling back into mother-mode felt comfortable to her, and she hugged the feeling to herself, cherishing it.

"Of course, Mom. Did you think I'd let you go to all this trouble, and then flunk out to thank you? It's so much more fun to actually have teachers, instead of trying to learn everything on my own from books. Did you know that I have what's known as an eidetic memory? Not many people have it. It means that I remember everything I see, like a detailed picture. Cool, huh?" Will proceeded to tell her all about his classes, enthusing mostly about his calculus class, which appealed to him like nothing else ever had. The simplicity and complexity of the subject were entwined in an almost magical way that made his mind sing with the possibilities. Working the problems was just as relaxing for him as his martial arts were. He tried to convey this to his mother, but could tell that she was just missing him and enjoying the sound of his happiness. They talked about his classes, and then his mother updated him on the ranch news before they both signed off, yawning.

Will put the cell phone on his bedside table, then laid back on his pillow again, staring at the ceiling. Thoughts about Mulder and Scully were whizzing through his mind. Their importance to him had not declared itself yet, and he couldn't help but wonder about the strong feeling he had. He laid there for a long time before stirring, amazed to see that several hours had passed, if he was to believe his clock. Sighing, he stood to get ready for bed.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Bainbridge Island

They were the first car to drive off of the ferry, and made the best of it. Keeping within the speed limit, they made their way out of the terminal area in controlled panic. After exiting the terminal area, Mulder peeled out down the main road. Or, at least, he tried to, but it only lasted a few feet before he was bogged down in the heavy rush hour traffic. Making use of the year he had spent on the island, he cut over to a less-maintained, but also less utilized road that wound behind the main part of town and eventually led back to the road that would take them home.

Scully was fighting the return of the pessimism that had been the norm during her last two years with the FBI, but suspected that they had probably always been under some kind of observation, and that it made no difference how they got home. Someone probably already knew where they lived. Whether it was the bureau, or the resurrected Consortium, she couldn't even hazard a guess. She supposed it could even be the cult that had kidnapped William as a baby, the one which insisted that William and Mulder were central to their prophecies. She ran probabilities and suspicions through her mind like a computer chewing on numbers, but all of the possibilities got tangled somewhere in there, in the place where emotions had more sway than logic. Although Scully had always prided herself on her ability to compartmentalize her emotions away from her professional persona, it had been an overwhelming day, and her mental divisions were crumbling.

"I just can't." It came out as a whisper that seemed as loud as a shout in her own ears, a scream of defeat and surrender. It must have sounded just as bad to Mulder, because he lost it completely.

"Scully, stop it!" Mulder glanced over at her as he turned at speed onto Toe Jam Hill Road, barely keeping control of the car as he fought his urge to let go of the wheel to drag her into the safety and strength of his body. "We are _not_ giving in to this so easily! You are stronger than this. _We _are stronger. Stop talking yourself into giving up!" By the end of this, he was shouting at her, something he never did, and it got her attention.

Scully stared at this stranger in amazement. Primal rage, something she thought he had left behind with the FBI, was burning on his face. Never before had it been aimed in her direction. It contorted his features and gave him the aspect of a demented minor god, one that you didn't dare to defy. She leaned away from him, not quite in fear, but in respect, for he seemed larger and more powerful in the grip of this fierce rage. He was right and she knew it. That his anger was directed at her for letting her weaknesses drive her was necessary. It was the catalyst to engage her own rage against the injustice of lost opportunities, against the waste of a decade of their lives, and against their struggle with powers too vast to even comprehend. Now was not the time to cower. They needed to embrace their belief in the basic truth that the strong survived while the weak perished. As she stared at him, she watched the return of reason and calm to his face as he dragged himself back under control.

Mulder stared at the road, even as he peripherally noted her withdrawal from his space. He allowed his anger to dissipate, and huffed it out with panting lungs full of air. "Scully. Scully. Scully. Scully. God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to shout. I just …" He stopped talking, not knowing what he wanted to say.

"Mulder, you're right."

"What?" His head whipped towards her in disbelief. How many times had he dreamed of hearing those very sweet words? Already the strange turn of events had him off-balance, and this added to his sense of things being backwards between him and Scully. Usually, he was the one who allowed his passion to rule his actions and drag him places that weren't necessarily safe or crucial, and Scully was the one who strode forward on a tide of logic and calm determination, actions guided by her ability to weigh pros and cons instantly and accurately.

Scully continued to push her panic back into its tidy little box, building its walls back as she did. At his disbelieving look, she almost smiled. "Okay, don't make such a big deal out of it. You're right, already. It was bound to happen. Like the monkeys and Shakespeare. I can't say that the shouting thing was fun, but I needed it. I was operating on pure panic. I need to stop. We _have_ to work as a team. It's the only way we'll be strong enough. It's the only way we ever were." She was saying these words to Mulder, but was really talking to herself, using the words to shore up her defenses. She felt it was safe enough to reach for Mulder's big hand now, which gave her a sort of anchor that would keep her from drifting off into that endless ocean of defeat that she had been heading out into. He clutched at her small, strong one in return, almost as if he needed to anchor himself as well.

Scully busied herself by looking into the mirrors, trying to determine if they were being followed. She had plenty of experience at spotting tails, but it had been awhile, and she asked Mulder, "See anything?" She trusted his skills more than her own these days, considering the fact that he was still a practicing investigator, and she only tagged along occasionally. She couldn't think of anyone else she'd rather have at her back.

"No." The answer was terse, and she could tell that he had activated his spider senses, and was sorting through the input. His eyes jumped from mirror to mirror, never still, ever alert. When he was in this mode, it was best to just let him do it.

"But you… feel something still?" Keeping a grip on his hand, she stared at his face, trying to read it in the gathering gloom of the evening.

"Not really, anymore, but …" he admitted, but his face remained stony as he resumed his silence. But he reassured her wordlessly by gently rubbing his thumb along the outside of hers. He kept his senses alert as he scanned the mirrors for any sign of being followed. As they neared the intersection of Toe Jam and South Beach, he tenderly squeezed her hand, and released it to negotiate the turn.

They approached their driveway from the west and Mulder slowly drove past it, scanning for anything out of the ordinary. Scully joined in on the surveillance, and didn't see anything noteworthy. But she trusted Mulder's senses more than her own. He still had some kind of sixth sense left over from the war that had been waged within his brain when he was at the mercy of the alien virus, and she believed in it with her whole being.

"Anything?"

"Nothing."

Mulder drove a bit further and steered into a pull-off to turn around. There was no one else on the road, and he whipped the car around with the precision of years of practice. They drove warily back to their own driveway and pulled in. As they followed the winding drive down to the garage, their senses felt hyper-alert, but they noticed nothing unusual. Scully reached up and pushed the garage door opener, and Mulder didn't even pause as he drove straight into the garage and parked next to Scully's green Toyota. As he drove in, she kept her eye on the mirror, to make sure no one snuck in behind them. She pushed the button again, and the door closed.

"God. I feel so paranoid," Scully griped.

"Just like old times. It's just a survival skill." Mulder tried to make her smile a little, and only got her to shake her head.

"It's just that I thought we were finished with living in survival mode. I don't want to believe in this whole international government conspiracy that an alien invasion will inevitably take place in 2012."

Her tired husband opened his door and stepped out of the car. The two wrung-out people decided with a single eloquent look to unload the car in the morning. Mulder reached for Scully's hand again as she made her way around the car, and together, they made their way to the side door of the garage. Mulder remembered to duck as they negotiated around the front of Scully's car, to avoid the two bicycles which hung from the ceiling there, but he didn't let go of his wife's hand.

He saw her right hand go to the small of her back and come out from under her suit jacket gripping her firearm. Mulder felt marginally safer as he opened the side door, and peered out. Everything seemed peaceful and still. They made their way quickly to the back door of the house and Mulder unlocked it quickly. Dropping Scully's hand, he drew his own gun and entered the house with Scully at his back. They paused to listen and heard nothing that shouldn't be making noise, although the refrigerator was making a noise like a swarm of bees. Locking the back door before they left the kitchen, they made their way quickly through the house, checking every room. They came up with nothing.

Finally sighing in relief, Scully sank into one of the couches. After placing her weapon onto the coffee table, she leaned forward and supported her head with her hands, which she noticed had begun to shake. The adrenaline was wearing off, and she felt intensely cold, like she would never get warm. It had been one hellacious day, and she was done with it. All she wanted was a bath, a glass of wine, and her bed, in that order. She decided then and there that she was too old to fight vast government conspiracies, and that she would book the first flight to the Bahamas in the morning. For now, it seemed next to impossible to move, though, so she just sat there. She wasn't sure where Mulder had gone, but was hoping that he would remember that bottle of local wine that they had bought, and bring her a glass.

Instead, he showed up empty-handed, grasped her hand, and pulled her up off the couch. He led her to the stairs, and helped her climb up, a task that seemed as monumental to her as climbing Mount Everest. To Mulder, getting Scully to climb the stairs seemed like trying to make wet Jell-o run a 10K race. Halfway up, when he finally lifted her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, and only got a token grunt in protest, he knew that she was at the bottom of her reservoir. He walked through the bedroom to the master bath, set her on her unsteady feet, and she saw what he had done. She wanted to fall down and worship the man as her own personal god. The tub was full of hot water, scented with one of her (and his?) favorite oils. The coveted glass of wine sat on the edge of the tub, waiting.

"Can you manage, or would you like help?" he asked softly.

"Help." She didn't want to acknowledge her weakness, but couldn't see any way around it. If she was going to get into that tub, he would have to assist. She let him help her with her clothes, and let him help her get into the tub, where she promptly sank up to her neck into the fragrant water. She sank a bit lower, even, blowing gentle bubbles out of her nose. She finally felt some warmth coming back to her.

"Whoa! Not too deep, there. Can't have you drowning after making it through a crazy day like today."

"I'm fine, Mulder. Let me soak. Sit there and sing to me, if you want to be useful."

"Ha. Yeah, I'll just work my way down through my repertoire. Should I start with your favorite, Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog?" He was a bit nervous at her use of the phrase "I'm fine," because, when she used it, she was usually anything but. So, he eyed her carefully and decided to stick around, even if it meant that he had to sing.

"That is NOT my favorite song. It simply happens to be the only song that I know all the words to. You know what, just forget it. Tell me what you think of our son."

This came out of the blue, and Mulder wasn't ready for the discussion. He could hear the faint hint of fear in her voice, fear of what he would say? He hesitated, then said slowly, picking his words carefully, "Scully, to tell you the truth, even though I have always thought of William as _our_ son, I wasn't truly convinced that he genetically belonged to me, until I saw him today." He saw the storm gathering on her face and rushed to head it off. "I wasn't entirely sure that he was conceived by us, together, because of the Consortium's involvement with your implant and with your ova. But my last doubts as to his origins faded to nothing today, the moment I recognized his face, how much he looks like a blend of both of us. He_ is_ our son, Scully, whether conceived of our union or of their lab, we'll never know, but nothing could have been more obvious, and nothing could have made me happier than to finally have that fear dispelled. He _was_ a miracle, _our_ miracle."

The storm had fled, and in its place were tears, gathering in her eyes but not falling. She looked steadily at her toes on the far end of the tub to keep from succumbing to this round of tears. Enough, today. She didn't know what to say to her partner, because the very same thoughts had been in her mind for the past eleven years. She had wondered where her son was, what he was doing, if he was being made to serve some nefarious purpose dreamed up by men with no consciences, or if she had truly been able to effect a safe and secret haven for him to grow to adulthood.

"Mulder, I had the same fears."

"I know, Scully." He held her soapy hand.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Seattle

The house where Will boarded was a sort of geek and nerd group home. The people who ran it were geeks in their own right; they owned a computer business that catered to Mac users. They boarded four students for the magnet school, who were, like Will, relatively young, compared to the kids in the school dorms. Will was the youngest of the four kids, but the others already looked to him as a leader. It seemed that, unlike them, he actually had some social skills. His charismatic way of calming people came in handy with the intense emotionality associated with the profoundly gifted. They flocked to him like birds to a feeder, treasuring that which they sensed in him without being able to name it, sure that they had discovered, at last, someone who just "got it."

The morning after the job fair, Will made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. It was quite early, but finding one of the other students there was in no way extraordinary. None of the four kids seemed to need quite as much sleep as ordinary kids. They were all early-birds to some degree. It was as if their restless mental energy was an independent source of energy for their bodies. Will made his way mutely past the other kid, and reached for a cereal bowl. As he filled it with granola, he glanced at his companion's choice of breakfast.

"Cripes, Donovan, that stuff will give you instantaneous diabetes," he opined, as he recognized the cereal as one containing as much sugar as it contained artificial coloring.

"Mornin', Will. Mind your own business." Donovan was a stout kid of thirteen, and outweighed Will by a good seventy-five pounds, despite being almost exactly the same height. He grinned at his friend, and started shoveling the brightly colored loops into his mouth.

Will sat down with his bowl of granola and expended almost as many calories chewing it as the cereal deposited into his energy account. He sat with his right hand moving the spoon smoothly between the bowl and his mouth, and his left hand clutching at a well-worried business card that stated, "Fox Mulder, Private Investigations" above a phone number. The letters were a plain block design, and were the only thing on the card. Staring at the card and thinking, his body was very still, except for the motion of his right hand shoveling granola, and that of his left forefinger scuffing away at the edge of the card. There was nothing ostentatious at all about the card. It set forth a calm, confident assurance that the private investigation would be just that: private, competent, and well-executed. It spoke of a simple truth to young Will.

"What's that?" asked Donovan, poking at the card with a pudgy finger.

"It's a business card. I got it yesterday from the career fair."

"Huh. Private Investigations? That doesn't sound like the same kind of stuff everyone else was talking about. I didn't even see his booth." Donovan got up off of the breakfast bar stool to rinse his bowl and add it to the dishwasher, something that Will felt sure that Donovan never would have done at home. House rules demanded certain behaviors that the other boy had learned to live with. He leaned back against the sink and regarded Will curiously.

"It belongs to a guy who was helping a doctor in her booth. They're married, I think. I was thinking about calling him. He seemed . . . interesting, different."

"Huh. So, what have you got today? Calculus, I know, but what else?"

"I have BritLit, Chemistry, and Physics Lab. What do you have?"

The two boys discussed their classes for the day, while Will finished eating. They started to hear sounds upstairs that indicated that other people were starting to stir. Will was in a strange, solitary mood, and didn't really want to be drawn into the general drama of the morning, so he decided to get moving and head to school, where the library was staffed 24 hours a day.

"I'm going to head in early and spend some time at the library," Will stated as he left the kitchen. Another indistinct grunt was his friend's reply. Donovan was strictly a math wizard, and didn't think much of language skills, as far as Will could tell. Will made his way back down the hallway to the stairs and up to his room. He didn't pass any of his housemates, and was glad for this. Collecting his books, he stashed them into his backpack. The business card was carefully stowed in one of his jean pockets, after he debated briefly with himself about just leaving it on his desk. It felt heavy in his pocket, despite being practically weightless. Will wasn't even sure why he put it in his pocket; his eidetic memory was enough to allow him to put the picture of the card before his eyes at any point. In fact, it floated there mockingly as he marched down the stairs, straight out the door, and off of the porch. "Call me, call me," it seemed to sing to him.

Making his way down the street towards school, Will was on the point of pulling his cell phone out of his pocket to punch in those numbers, when he suddenly had the unmistakable feeling that he was being watched. It was almost a physical sensation, like an ant crawling on the back of his neck. He froze. Just as abruptly, he realized that anyone watching would recognize that he was suddenly aware, if he started scanning the street for the offender. So, he quickly feigned a fit of forgetfulness by patting his pockets and checking the various compartments of his backpack for the fictitious lost item, in order to cover for his sudden stop in the middle of the sidewalk. Pretending that he had found what he had lost, he swung the heavy backpack around to his shoulder again, and started walking at a quickened pace. He didn't see the nicely landscaped, albeit small, yards that he passed. He tripped uncharacteristically over an uneven spot in the sidewalk due to his devout determination to look straight ahead of him. But his vision was swimming with his tension, and seemed unclear except at the center.

Without seeming to look around, he cut his eyes back and forth to see if he could pinpoint where the feeling was coming from. He had the sudden feeling that there were way too many rhododendron bushes lining this street. In his imagination, every single one morphed into a shadowy, sinister spot for unsavory characters to lurk. Unsuccessful at isolating an origin for his fear, he became more nervous. Will wondered if his unexpected paranoia stemmed from Scully's account of his birth and first year. Anyone would be edgy, after hearing that he had been kidnapped by a strange cult when he was a baby. But what if . . .

Deciding abruptly that he needed to talk to Mulder, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He never talked to anyone except his mother on it, so he had hundreds of unused minutes. Without caring that it was barely six-thirty in the morning, he punching in the numbers that floated before his eyes on the remembered little square of cardstock. It only rang twice before it was answered tersely, "Mulder."

Will was suddenly unsure of what to say. He had never before had trouble calling speech forth, but now he stumbled, "Uh . . . Mulder?"

"This is Fox Mulder. Who's that calling? Is this Will?" The voice carrying over the cell phone was clear, confident, and deep. It reassured Will immediately, and he tried to talk again.

"Uh, yeah. This is Will. Did I wake you up?" Will kept up his blistering pace towards the school, imagining that he would feel safer in the library, there, because the night librarian knew everyone who frequented the place at this hour. Traffic was still pretty light on this street, and that made him jumpy, too. He decided that he'd be safer with more people around him.

"Heck, no, I never sleep this late. You must be an early bird, too."

"Yeah, most of the time. Listen, I feel kind of silly calling, but I just left my boarding house, and something weird happened. Something that I've never experienced before, and I don't know if Scully's stories of my birth and first year are to blame, but I suddenly felt like someone was watching me. I've never been paranoid like that before, and it was kind of spooky and . . ." His reticence was obviously behind him now, and the words poured out of him like a verbal diarrhea that was completely uncontrollable.

Mulder broke into his soliloquy, "Whoa, whoa, slow down. Where are you, Will? Are you saying that you're being followed by someone? Do you think you're in danger?"

In addition to Mulder's voice, Will now heard a female voice in the background, asking what was going on.

"Shit, Mulder, I don't know! I'm new at this paranoia thing. I was just walking along, when I felt the skin on my neck crawling. I tried not to look suspicious, you know, and just kept walking. I'm about a block from my school, and the library is open all night, so I was just going to go in there, where there are a lot of people. Is there some reason someone would be interested in me? Is this because I met you and Scully? Is Scully there with you?" Will knew he was asking too many questions at once, but his desire to keep Mulder on the phone was overwhelming him. The link seemed to be the only thing keeping him from running shrieking down the road at this point. Adrenaline finally seemed to have sharpened his senses further, and everything around him seemed to have slowed down and become sharper and brighter than normal.

"Scully's here, Will. We're worried about you. It's probably nothing, but keep talking to us until you get into the library. We're going to come to the school, is that okay?" Mulder was unsure whether the boy would agree to that, but asked anyway. His danger sensors were clanging loudly in his head, and they had hardly ever let him down. Scully was standing close to him now, with her ear sharing the receiver.

"Okay. Okay. I'm nearly there. I'm at the door. Okay, okay. Mulder? I'm inside. I'm going to go in by the librarian, and we can't have cell phones in there. Please come. I'm a little freaked out, here, and for some reason, you and Scully are registering in the safe zone on my trust meter."

Scully jumped into the conversation, saying, "Will. Stay there. We can be there in about an hour. What time do your classes start?"

"At nine, today." He was hesitating at the inner door to keep talking with the pair.

"We'll be there well before that. Go check in with the librarian and let me talk to her." Scully waited, as she heard the door open and a faint voice telling Will that he couldn't have a cell phone in the library. She heard him explain what was going on, and then the librarian came onto the line.

"Hello? Who is this? What's going on?" The voice had the martial ring of a veteran peacekeeper, and Scully felt safer as she imagined a librarian with immovable iron gray hair plastered into a soldierly helmet around her sharp-featured bespectacled face wearing an old-fashioned, matronly dress in pressed olive drab.

"Hi, this is Dr. Scully. I am a pediatrician on Bainbridge Island, and I was a participant in the career fair yesterday, where I made the acquaintance of Will Van De Kamp. He called me today on his way to school, because he felt unsafe, like he was being followed. I would like to have him stay there with you, within sight until we get there. Please check with the school office to make sure that it's okay. Please call me if anything strange happens." Scully reeled off her cell number, and then Mulder's. She asked to talk to Will again briefly.

"Yeah?"

"Okay, Will, stay put, and put your phone on vibrate. That way, we can call if we need to, and you can sneak in the bathroom or foyer to talk. One hour." Her nerves made her terse and professional, the cop personality coming out.

"Okay, Scully. Thank you."

"Bye, Will. It will be okay."

"Bye, Scully. Bye Mulder." He suddenly sounded like the scared little boy that he was, and Scully caught her breath as he disconnected.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Seattle

Scully's tension was a living thing, flying demonically around the car and beating Mulder over the head for the entire ferry trip across the sound. He felt thoroughly thrashed before they ever left the dock. They sat together in his car on the dark car deck, without making the small journey up to the viewing deck, because their combined dark state of mind was not for public consumption. Scully was almost out of her mind with fear by the time the ferry docked in Seattle, and Mulder's hands were shaking with the effort to keep both himself under control and to keep her from flying into pieces.

Trying to calm her by distracting her, he resorted to a dry, "Well, I guess we know who he got his spider senses from."

"That's not funny, Mulder."

"You know how many times my radar was wrong," he reminded her. "Remember how many times I thought it was the pizza guy, or something."

"One time it WAS the pizza guy."

"Well, ONCE. But that was in Texas."

"Drive, Mulder, and shut up." Her left leg was jumping up and down with the regularity of a metronome, and it was driving him crazy, but he decided not to mention it because he was pretty sure she was armed.

Mulder drove off of the ferry, bumping over the ramps and following the convoluted lanes out of the loading area. He turned onto the nearly deserted streets of early-morning Seattle, and headed towards the on-ramp for I-5. After ten more minutes of driving, the pair of them gained the tree-lined neighborhood of the Jackson Calhoun Science and Medical Magnet School, and located the library building. Parking was no problem this early, and they found a spot close to the library with little effort.

Scully was out of the car almost as soon as it stopped, but found herself caught up against a hard wall of muscle and grasped hard by her upper arms. A quick fear response had her executing an ingrained tactical move to extricate herself from the hold and turning the tables on the surprised giant who had, until recently, held her arms immobile. Before he could move, she had his face smashed against the side of the car, and his left arm twisted painfully behind his back, while shoving her elbow into the middle of his back. His right arm was at the side of his body with his fingers spread on the window of the car, with the painful exception of his pinkie, which was being pulled back earnestly by Scully.

Mulder was just getting out of the car, and he looked surprised to see the face of the man Scully had pinned.

"Hey, Skinner."

"Hey, Mulder. Do you think you can call her off?" he asked indistinctly through his twisted mouth.

"I dunno. What did you do to her?" Mulder asked politely.

"Nothing! I was just standing here, and she ran into me. The next thing I knew, I was polishing your car."

"She really hasn't lost any of her skills."

"No, she really hasn't."

"Scully…"

Scully had listened to the conversation through the haze of her adrenaline-induced mind-fog and, whether it was due to the laughable improbability or her absolute certainty that this man was indeed their old boss from the FBI, she gave the finger that she was currently molesting a extra wrench. She heard his responding grunt with satisfaction. "What."

"It's Skinner. Let him go."

She seemed to consider the information momentarily, and then let the man up off of the side of the car. She turned her back on him without acknowledging him, and stood scanning the street, chest heaving as she tried to regain control of her breathing. The fight or flight response always manifested in fight with her, for some reason, and it was always hard to come down from it. She still wanted to kick someone's ass. She finally calmed down and turned around to join the men.

"Skinner."

"Scully. How are you?" He was replacing his freshly wiped glasses onto his face.

So, they were going to ignore the fact that she had pinned him to her car. "I was doing fine, until yesterday. Then things started to get a little weird. What the hell are you doing in Seattle? Mulder. Library?" She felt antsy to get to her son, and standing on the street talking was not doing it for her.

They all started walking, but Skinner dropped a bombshell that stopped all forward motion immediately. "We've been watching Will."

"What?" The single word came from both former agents, and carried identical disbelief. They all stopped walking in the dim, early-morning light, and the pair stared at Skinner intently, sure that an explanation was forth-coming.

"How could you even know where he was?" This was from Scully, but Mulder had been thinking the same words.

"We knew where he was from the time you placed him. We have been watching over him from the beginning. I wanted to make sure he was safe."

"You… you could have told me," Scully whispered brokenly. She was looking off into a twisted madrona tree. Her thoughts felt as disordered as the naked red branches.

Skinner couldn't look into her eyes, anyway, couldn't meet what he knew he'd see there, the blame, the accusation, the pain, the regret. He had a tough time with women's eyes in general, but Scully's eyes destroyed him. She'd been through so much, she was so strong, but everything she felt was always there, shining in her crystalline eyes. So, he looked down at the sidewalk, feeling cowardly and staying silent for too long.

Finally, he managed to mumble, "I'm sorry. I thought it would be easier for you."

Mulder was shaking his head in warning, knowing where this was going. He had learned very early on that one did not decide for Scully what was best or easiest for her if one wanted to keep one's manhood intact. He moved a little further away from Skinner. It seemed prudent not to be standing too close to the tree when lightning was about to strike.

Pulling upon his hostage-negotiation training, he told Scully, "Uh, here's the library." She was glaring at Skinner with her chin out in a way that was always a bad sign. Turning, she marched up the wide concrete steps to the elaborately ornate doors and flung one open. Or, she would have flung one open, had it cooperated. As it was, it weighed in at about twelve hundred pounds, and wasn't about to be flung anywhere. She settled for heaving it unceremoniously out of her way enough to slip into the cool, hushed interior of the library. She mostly wanted to put space between herself and Skinner, and to get to Will. Walking past the electronic barriers, she scanned the front carrels for Will's lanky form unsuccessfully. Feeling more frantic by the second, she looked under the carrels for any sign of his sneakered feet. At the sight of his feet under the third set, she felt her lungs deflate rapidly and thought she might collapse into the middle of the carpet, which was adorned with the seal of the president of the school. Pure will-power propelled her forward and around the end of the row of desks. There was no one else on the far side of the row, and she saw Will immediately. He was hunched over a math book, scribbling madly on a page in his notebook. He looked up, startled, by the time she was fifteen feet away. He stood to greet her.

Relief flooded his features as he recognized her, and Scully was again knocked off balance by how much the boy looked like Mulder. She smiled at him in pure joy and watched Mulder's smile light up his features in return. As quickly as the joy had filled her, sadness chased it. Tears sprang to her eyes and she quickly looked down to hide them. She privately lamented all of the tiny moments she had missed in his life, and all of the years she had given away to another woman instead of getting to know this extraordinary person.

But he had missed nothing. "Scully…" he said softly. He reached out a gentle hand to grasp hers – he was already as tall as she was – "It will be great to get to know you. I know you feel like you missed a lot." His eyes held a compassion and understanding beyond his years.

She could only nod, not trusting her voice. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Skinner and Mulder approached from the same way she had come, and she swiftly turned away from them to compose herself, unaccustomed to showing weakness, which is what she considered showing emotions in public. By the time they reached the pair, she had attained her former level of control, and turned to meet them. Skinner could only stare at the boy, never having seen him in person. Will looked at him curiously.

"Will, this is Walter Skinner, an old friend and colleague of ours," Mulder took the time to say, as he noticed.

Will put his hand out to Skinner, and shook his hand. "It's nice to meet you, sir."

Skinner demonstrated immediately that he had about as much intuition about kids as he had about women, and blurted out, "Will, Your mother is dead. She was killed last night in a suspicious fire, and it's being investigated as a crime. There was a man killed in the fire as well."

Everyone froze. It could have been a frame in a cartoon. Will looked over at Scully with an expression of dread and disbelief suddenly etched onto his youthful features, mixed with a look that asked her to deny the horrible words. She could only stare back mutely at him, knowing that, whatever faults Skinner possessed, leaping to reveal information prematurely was not one of them. Mulder grasped her hand and stepped forward with her as she reached out to clasp Will's with her other. Skinner stood awkwardly aside, knowing that his delivery had lacked something human, but not knowing how he could have borne the news in any less painful a way.

Will felt so numb, that he scarcely felt Scully's fingers take his own. The pressure was there, but he couldn't feel the warmth and his entire body suddenly felt cold; he began to shiver. Before long, the shivers became so violent that his teeth started to chatter.

"He's in shock, Mulder."

"I'll go get my coat from the car." Mulder disappeared for the few minutes it took to fetch the coat, and put it around the boy when he returned. Will didn't seem to notice. He didn't notice anything that was going on around him. He didn't notice the trio of people around him split up to take care of several tasks relating to his well-being.

"I'm going to the headmaster's office. The FBI is taking the three of you into protective custody. He'll go with the two of you to a safe house for the time being. All three of you." Skinner didn't quite look at Scully, but he emphasized the words for her, knowing she was on the verge of combat.

"We're not FBI any more." Scully's chin was out again. Even Skinner couldn't miss the portent. He knew she meant he couldn't order her around.

"Scully…" She turned away from him and tuned him out. Mulder caught his eye and shook his head at the older man. Skinner took the warning for what it was and headed for the headmaster's office to try to salvage what was left of his task. Mulder quietly put a hand on Scully's right shoulder and slid it in slow motion to the left. When it reached the left shoulder, he paused long enough to allow the warmth of his palm to penetrate her jacket, and then slid his hand in slow motion to the right. He continued the motion for some time, back and forth, until he felt the tension leave her shoulders, and then he quietly slipped away to follow Skinner to the headmaster's office.

Will didn't even notice that the time for his math class had come and gone. He stopped shivering some time after Mulder put his coat around him, and simply sat, rocking slightly in his hard chair, clutching at Scully's fingers as if they were the ends of a rope that he needed to cling to if he were to survive the day. After several hours of sitting there in the library, insensible to all of the preparations that had had to go on around him to allow him to leave the school with Mulder and Scully, he rose when Scully rose, and followed her unquestioningly to her car. He slid obediently in beside her as she got into the back seat, never releasing her fingers. Then, as if the vibrations of the motor shook loose the stones in the dam holding his emotions in check, he erupted into tears, leaning helplessly into Scully's sympathetic embrace.

"Mama, mama," he sobbed, and Scully's heart broke, too. She held him close, stroking his soft dark hair, so like Mulder's, whispering quiet words of comfort with tears rolling down her cheeks, while Mulder drove them away from the school, away from the only other safe place Will had known besides his home.

By the time Mulder reached the safe house at the address Skinner had given him, he noticed through the fog of his own thoughts that there was finally silence in the back seat. After parking in the enclosed courtyard and shutting off the engine, he looked into the back of the car. Will had sobbed himself into an exhausted sleep against Scully's shoulder with Mulder's coat pulled up to his ear. Scully had her own head lying against Will's, and Mulder couldn't tell if she were sleeping, or just holding Will. Her fiery hair had fallen over her son's dark strands and the mixture had created a lovely fan pattern that the afternoon sun set to glowing. Was it already afternoon? Mulder sat staring at these two people, one of them dear to him through so many mystifying and wonderful years, and the other dear to him only as a tiny, warm bundle with a wrinkled funny face, so many years ago, and now suddenly as a wholly different, barely recognizable person, with so many fascinating facets that Mulder didn't know where to start exploring. He wondered at all of the strange and fantastic events that had to happen to put them both in the back seat of his car at this moment. Fate? Chance? Or the evil machinations of intelligence? What possibility was the most likely? These were the kind of thoughts he believed he'd left behind, and he'd forgotten how much mental energy they took to process. He felt exhausted, simply trying to decide which possibility to focus upon.

A tap on his window made him jump almost out of his skin. Turning and reaching for his gun at the same moment, he saw with relief that it was an FBI agent with his badge out, trying to get his attention. He turned all the way around, still half-distracted by his thoughts. He ran the window down, and showed the man his driver's license and PI license, along with the paperwork given to him by Skinner. The agent directed him to drive into the garage, and Mulder started the car again and complied, coming to a stop inside the nearly empty two-car garage. The lack of clutter made the house so obviously a safe house that Mulder wanted to laugh, or cry, or run screaming down the steep street in front of the non-descript beige-colored ranch house. Instead, he stared inanely at the blank, unfinished wall as the garage door came down jerkily behind the car.

Rustling sounds in the back seat were followed by soothing fingers running through the hair at his nape and her soft whispery voice, "Mulder." He'd heard the same syllables, the same tone, the same intonation, the same decibels, thousands of times. They never failed to reset his circuits, to reconnect his reality. He slowly blinked several times and finally just closed his eyes, and saw her quiet blue eyes looking into him from his deepest memories.

"Yeah." He leaned into her fingers, to let her know he realized her pain and felt his own brand of the same. He reached up and gently stroked her arm, making circles with his thumb on the inside of her wrist.

"Something's going on."

"Yeah." He sighed.

"And we're in the middle of it."

"Uh-huh."

"Again."

"Again." His fatalistic tone matched hers exactly, even though he couldn't have told her why they were in the middle of whatever was going on. He knew it had to do with Will, somehow.

She was silent then, rolling his hair between the fingers of her left hand, thinking, as she always had, that it was far too silky to belong to a man. She brought her right hand up to stroke the hair of the man-child leaning against her, knowing already that it would feel exactly the same. She closed her eyes, wanting to memorize the moment, knowing that something was coming at them and that it would come so fast that she wouldn't be able to breathe, just as events had transpired in the past. She knew she would get through whatever happened; she was strong. She also knew that she would feel every emotion to the core of her being, even as she denied them and even as she expended unnecessary amounts of energy hiding them. She knew she would watch Mulder feel every emotion to the core of his being, and display them violently in every direction around himself, even as she expended large amounts of energy helping him to control them. She just wanted to remember the perfection of this peaceful moment, before it all started. She felt Mulder slip away, and she opened her eyes to meet his in the gloom of the dim garage.

"Let's go," he said softly.

She looked down at Will, wondering whether to wake him. It seemed cruel to bring him out of the oblivion of his sleep to confront the reality of his loss just yet.

"I'll get him." Mulder got out of the car and came around to the passenger side. He gathered the lanky boy, like he weighed nothing. He didn't stir as Mulder lifted him, and seemed limp in the large man's arms. Mulder stood there and cradled his son's head gently, looking down at the sleeping face, with a look of wonder on his own. Scully remembered seeing that same look on his face when he laid his hand on her pregnant belly and felt their child kick him from within, and again as he held his newborn child for the first time; she could see that he was already in love with this boy. She propelled the two of them tenderly out of the attached garage, by placing a small, strong hand on Mulder's back and shoving him up the short flight of stairs towards the door to the kitchen.

A second agent awaited them in the kitchen and he led the way down a short hallway to a bedroom. Mulder deposited the boy on a twin bed, and covered the still-sleeping child with a blanket that Scully grabbed off of the dresser and handed him. It was a bare-bones room, like every safe-house he'd ever sat in, babysitting witnesses for hours of mind-numbing boredom, playing cards, reading bad paperbacks, telling other agents stories that may or may not have been true. The décor was true FBI. The walls were beige, the carpet was beige, the furniture was beige, the curtains were beige, and the comforter was an exciting shade of navy. The closet was empty, and the dresser probably was, too. Mulder walked to the window, and checked the lock. It was a beefed-up version, compliments of the FBI. He pulled the curtain closed, and moved quietly out of the room, pausing at the door to gaze at his son again.

Scully was waiting in the hall. He met her eyes sheepishly, knowing what she was thinking, but saw that she was looking at him sheepishly, too. As they took note of each other's expressions, they just started laughing, and Mulder reached for his wife. As he pulled her close, he muttered, "What a day."

"Ahem."

Mulder pulled back from Scully to look her in the eye, amusement barely concealed. "Gesundheit?"

"Didn't sneeze."

"Uh, sir?"

Mulder rounded on the kid, the second agent, and narrowed his eyes for a bit of fun. "Sir? Did you call me sir?" Mulder stepped a bit closer, glaring into the kid's whisky-brown eyes, which still met his own, a sign of bravery in Mulder's book.

"Yes, sir. Your room is over here. It isn't much . . ." The poor kid trailed off under Mulder's intense scrutiny.

"Have you manned a safe house before, son?" This was a serious question, one with a lot of weight, and Mulder's countenance showed it.

"Yes, sir." The agent square his not-inconsiderable shoulders, glad to be able to admit to having experience in something, before this legendary agent.

"Anyone get killed?"

"NO! sir. Of course, not!"

"Special Agent . . . uh . . ."

"Barrett, sir."

"Special Agent Barrett, when my wife and son are at risk, there is no 'of course not' at all. I want you and your partner to walk the perimeter at random times at least four times per hour tonight. Do not make it predictable. No phone calls, cell or otherwise. Your girl friends can wait. All other protocols will be observed."

"Yes, sir."

"HEY!" The loud syllable made Barrett jump, just as he was turning away to carry out Mulder's orders. He turned back.

"Yes, sir?"

"You don't take orders from me! I'm not even FBI anymore! I'm just Joe Blow, a guy in a safe house. What's the matter with you? Haven't you been trained?" Mulder was just getting wound up, and his eyes were starting to get a little crazy. Barrett eyed him warily, muscles bunching in anticipation of something further.

"Yes, sir. I've been trained very well. I've been trained to follow my superior officer's orders. My superior officer is AD Skinner. And he told me to do whatever you said."

"Oh. Fine." The crazy went out of Mulder's eyes as quickly as it had appeared.

"Mulder?" Scully pulled on his elbow and slid her other hand up his back as she quietly said his name, but she met Barrett's eye from behind Mulder. Her message was clear, _I've got this_. Barrett nodded and turned to leave.

He turned and looked down at her, noticing the shadows under her eyes. "Mm?"

"I'm going to go rest."

"I'll come with you."


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Seattle

"Shit." Agent Barrett flopped uncharacteristically into a chair at the dinette in the finely appointed dining room of the safe house. The young agent rubbed his hand down over his face.

"What?" The other agent, Rick Baker, leaned against the breakfast bar separating the room from the kitchen, comporting himself with significantly more dignity than his partner.

"That guy…"

"He's just a washed-up agent, Paul. Not even a very good one, if you remember how his career turned out. He should be in prison."

"He's a fucking legend, Rick. His solve rate was off the charts. Some of his cases were god-damned unsolvable in the first place."

"Yeah, well. You're letting him rattle you. You know his nickname, right? 'Spooky Mulder'? He just listens to those little voices in his head that the rest of us know would get us committed," Baker scoffed.

"Whatever. It worked. Skinner said to do what he told us to do. And he told us to set up random perimeter checks four times an hour. No phone calls, cell or otherwise. No calls to your wife or anything. All other protocols. Who's doing the first outside check, you or me?" Barrett gave his partner first choice. He was the senior agent, after all.

"What the hell difference does it make whether I call my wife? Shit, talk about paranoid! I'll get the outside one. You do inside. We'll rotate, so we don't get too bored, and you can smell the flowers twice an hour. This house sucks worse than most, huh?"

"Geez, would it kill them to use some other color than beige?" Barrett pulled his notebook from his breast pocket and noted the time. He walked over to the dining room window, pulled the curtain aside gingerly, while standing off to the side with paranoia suitable for a federal agent running a safe house, and scanned the view. The dining room looked over the street, and Barrett took note of various cars parked outside, even though his partner would do the same on his outside check. He noted two pedestrians, one runner and one child on a bicycle. It was a sunny day, late afternoon, and still before rush hour, so fairly quiet on the street. Barrett finished his scan, checked the window lock, and let the drape fall back in place.

It took Barrett about five minutes to check the entire house, except for the bedroom where Mulder and Scully were resting. Reluctant to disturb them, yet knowing he'd catch hell from Mulder if he didn't, he knocked softly.

Mulder opened the door almost immediately.

"Uh, sir . . . I'm doing a perimeter check, and, uh, this is the last room . . ."

"We're fine. I checked it. Did you check on Will?"

"Of course, sir."

"Okay." Mulder closed the door, and heard Barrett pad away on the carpet. He looked down at Scully, asleep on the small double bed. She looked tiny, curled up on the bed like a child, but he knew that he would have a hard time with the stupid thing, and would be hanging off of it by a foot. He had laid down with Scully, to hold her until she had fallen asleep, but spooning with her, and having room to sleep were two very different things. He hated having to be here. He started pacing again, which is what he had been doing when the agent had knocked. He had so much nervous energy, he knew he couldn't stay in this room, or he'd wake Scully, and she was exhausted from the morning's emotional upheaval. He gently turned the knob and left the room.

Mulder reached the kitchen at about the same time the two agents returned from their rounds. He greeted them absent-mindedly, his mind on finding a phone. When he spotted one on the wall in the dining room, he pointed at it, and asked, "Is that the phone you use to make your reports? Is it secure?"

"Yes, sir, that's the one. It's secure. Do you need to use it?" The older agent answered Mulder, and the younger held back.

"Do you have a local number for Skinner, or do you use his cell? Is his cell secure?"

Baker handed Mulder a card. "This is his local number. It should reach him at any time, he said. You can keep that. I put it in my cell phone."

"Thank you, Agent … uh,"

"Rick Baker."

"Baker. Thanks." Baker nodded and moved away.

Mulder pulled a chair out at the dinette and put his call through to Skinner, and was glad when he got through right away.

"Mulder, what's wrong?" Skinner sounded worried.

"What's wrong, you idiot, is that you need to take some child development courses, to begin with." Mulder watched Barrett's and Baker's faces blanche at his blatant disrespect for his old boss.

"Shit, Mulder. I'm sorry. I don't know how that went so wrong. It didn't go that way in my head.

"My kid is going to need a shrink for the rest of his life because of you."

"Mulder, your kid is going to need a shrink for the rest of his life, but it isn't going to be because of me. His genes are suspect."

"Asshole. Listen. I need you to do a favor for me, since you stuck me here. You know that I don't do well with boredom."

"I'm listening."

"Get in touch with my secretary, and have her get some files for me. I need to be working. Also, have Marilyn go by our house and get some things for Scully. She needs to be busy, too. Tell her I'll pay her overtime. Don't let her talk you into anything, she's a little kinky."

"I can do that."

"What, the kinky part?"

"No, Mulder, the other part."

Mulder gave him the details of what he needed, as well as what he needed to pick up for Scully, and got an update on the investigation into the arson at Will's house. He told Skinner that he needed to get in touch with Scully's office to have them cancel appointments there for at least a week, and then he got off the phone. As he did, he noticed a couple of things. The agents had gone off for another perimeter check, of which he approved. And, he was going to go out of his mind in this house. He pulled a pack of cards towards himself on the table and started playing solitaire, as his knee jiggled madly up and down, as if he were suddenly channeling Scully's ghost. As the thought occurred to him, he jumped up to go check on her, startling Baker as he came back into the dining room.

"They're fine, sir, I just checked."

"I know, I just . . . " Mulder kept walking. He opened Will's door first, then pulled it almost closed again. Scully's was next, and he went down on his knees next to her, holding his breath in his desperate need to make sure that she was breathing. Her forehead wrinkled faintly, then smoothed out, and he finally took in a breath, leaning his own head on his clenched fists on the side of the bed, a man in a pose of worship before his goddess. He felt her hand on his arm, then in his hair.

"Mulder, what are you doing?" She said with the hoarse whispery voice of the newly wakened.

"Breathing."

"I'm fine. Go away and let me sleep." It was said gently, with a depth of understanding that spoke of their years of finding each other almost dead, kidnapped, in situations of dire need, missing, and injured. It spoke of the quiet, waiting years since, when they hadn't quite relaxed that very last muscle. It spoke of the need to not think ahead, just yet.

"I know, I just . . . " He grasped her warm, fragrant hand, kissed it, and tucked it back under her blanket, before he stood and left.

As he reached the end of the hallway, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Pulling it out, he noted that it was his office phone, and guessed that Marilyn was calling to check on the veracity of Skinner's claim that he should be picking up papers for him. Mentally kicking himself for not calling her and giving her a heads-up, but grinning at Skinner's probable reception and thinking that he deserved every bit of verbiage Marilyn could dream up and hurl at him, he hit the button to reject the call, and headed for the wall phone. He walked slowly, giving Marilyn time to work up a head of steam about his audacity to reject her call, and to take it out on Skinner. Mulder spent a few hedonistic moments imagining Skinner's complete inability to handle Marilyn's idiosyncrasies, before he dialed Skinner, and heard Marilyn in full swing in the background.

"Skinner."

"Problems?"

"Damn it, Mulder, can't you hire someone normal?" Mulder heard his secretary shrieking, "I heard that!" in the background, and grinned.

"Now, is that any way to make friends with my secretary? Why don't you hand the phone over to her, and I'll calm her down, if you haven't taken things beyond repair, yet."

Mulder heard deep mumblings alternating with higher pitched complaints, and wondered if the phone might end up in the toilet before he got to speak with Marilyn. Finally, he heard her voice, "Well? What have you got to say for yourself, Mr. Mulder? It had better be good, because I am just about gone. I don't care how good this guy's ass looks in a pair of dress pants."

"Marilyn, sweetheart! How is your day going?" It must be deadly dull around there, huh?"

"Don't you try to 'sweetheart' _me_, mister. I want to know what's going on, right now. Where the hell are you, and why haven't you been here, or at least checked in? This is just not like you! And why is this giant bag of muscle in your office trying to steal your files, insisting that he has your permission, waving his little badge around like I'm gonna be afraid of a few little letters?"

"Okay, calm down, it isn't as bad as you're making it out to be. I've had to go into a safe house for a few days until a situation blows over. Skinner is just my old boss from the FBI, and I asked him to pick up some work for me so I don't go stir-crazy, that's all."

"SAFE HOUSE? SAFE HOUSE? WHAT situation? Where's Scully? Are you in danger? Why can't I bring you your files? Oh, my god!"

"Marilyn, it's a little thing, okay? Just work with me here! This is why I hired you, you know, because I knew you were a strong, tough chick, who could hold it all together when stuff like this came up." He crossed his fingers and hoped that the tough love thing would work.

Mulder could hear a repressed sniffle on the line. "O…Okay. Files. Which ones?"

He told her what he needed, and asked her to go over to the house with Skinner and get what Scully needed from there. He sighed and hung up, then took the time to turn his cell phone completely off. No need to give away his location. He should turn Scully's off, as well, he thought, and wandered off to do so.

It took Skinner thirteen games of solitaire, four games of hangman with Barrett (Mulder won all of them, but Barrett kept having to leave to do perimeter checks, so it was hardly fair), three outdated Time magazines, four _really_ outdated Readers Digest magazines (but the jokes were still funny), an hour of comparing notes with Baker after finding out that they had gone to the Academy within a year of each other, and seven cups of really bad coffee to arrive at the safe house. That didn't even count the pacing, grumbling, and complaining that Mulder had done in between. He practically pounced on Scully when she had emerged from her nap.

"FBI agents are so BORING!" he told her.

"God, tell me about it," she yawned. "All they do is complain, whine about being bored, and stand in between a girl and her coffee."

"Yeah, I know… hey, you're talking about me!" Mulder laughed and scuttled out of her way, so she could get to the coffee. "It's really bad, though. I was trying to save your life."

"So, are you nuts, yet?"

Playing it cool, he said, "Nuts? What do you mean?"

"She means, 'Have you played 13 games of solitaire, four games of hangman, read three Time magazines, four Reader's Digest mags, worn a hole in the hall carpet pacing, told ten thousand lies to Baker, drunk seven pots of coffee, and looked in the garage forty times to see if Skinner has arrived with your files yet, and driven the agents out of their minds,'" Barrett cut in, leaning into the kitchen, over the breakfast bar.

"Oh. That."

"Guess that's a yes. You called Skinner. Is that safe?" She sipped the coffee. She leaned against the kitchen counter, making a horrible face as the bitterness of the coffee finally registered.

"Do you think I'd put you in jeopardy?"

"Ha. You let me drink this."

"I tried to keep you away from it!"

"So, maybe not intentionally." She took another gulp, hoping to blister her taste buds with the heat, in order to be able to get enough caffeine in her system to function, without tasting too much of the coffee itself.

"Secure phones. I had him get some stuff for us to work on."

"Bet that went over well with Marilyn."

"There were some loud words. But she appreciated his ass."

"With good reason, but I'll bet that went over well with Skinner."

"Hey!" Mulder glared at her, while Barrett smothered a grin by turning to greet his partner.

"Gotta call 'em like I see 'em," Scully said patiently.

Baker wandered in and asked, "What'd I miss?"

"Nothing," Mulder said quickly.

"Don't ask," Barrett told his partner. "Anything out of place?"

Mulder dismissed the joking immediately and a professional demeanor washed over his face as he regarded Baker, waiting for the man's answer.

"Nope. It's all quiet."

His words were suddenly proven untrue by the sound of a car in the courtyard. Barrett and Baker were on immediate alert, telling everyone to stay put, while they checked it out. Hands resting lightly on their service weapons, both men careful entered the garage from the kitchen and closed the door behind them.

The men were gone for ten minutes, and Mulder was pacing and chewing the inside of his mouth to shreds with the impatience of a man unused to being told to stay put while a dangerous situation was defused. Hell,_ he _was the one who defused the dangerous situations. He didn't stay in the background. By this time, he was fuming. When the garage door finally opened and Barrett stepped carefully, slowly through the door, it was with the air of a man going to his death. Mulder reached for his own weapon, sure that they had been compromised. Then he saw the face behind the agent and relaxed, surmising the reason for the look on the agent's face.

"Hey, Marilyn. What are you doing here?" Mulder grinned, knowing it would be good, whatever it was she would say.

"I kidnapped Director Skinner," she admitted. "That's probably some kind of crime, huh?"

"In some states," Mulder agreed with her. Skinner came through the door behind her, shaking his head. He was carrying a large plastic file box, and had another bag looped around his neck. He was scowling, probably at Mulder, maybe at Marilyn.

"Hey, Skinner," Scully greeted him, taking the box off of his hands. She put it on the counter and grabbed the bag as well. "This is my computer!" She looked from Mulder to Skinner, and Skinner pointed at her husband. She nodded her thanks at him, eyes saying she'd thank him better later.

"So . . .the kidnapping," began Barrett, looking from Skinner to Marilyn.

"Never happened," denied Skinner.

"Did so."

"Marilyn, I agreed to bring you along, so that you would just shut up. That isn't kidnapping. That's coercion. That's a different justice code."

"Oh." She contemplated that for a minute. "Worse, or better?"

"Just different," three voices chorused.

"God. Three of you just alike. Do they just stamp you all out at the academy on an assembly line?"

"Yep," they all said. Scully just shook her head.

Skinner and Marilyn stayed another few minutes, and then left. Mulder set up camp on the dining room table and soon had his head in his files, chewing on his pencil, grunting at anyone who dared to speak to him. Before long, Scully found a spot on the couch and was dividing her time between working on her computer and checking on Will, who was still sleeping, dead to the world, in his room.

After her third trip to check on the boy, Mulder clawed his way to consciousness momentarily to ask with some concern, "Did you give him something?"

"What would I give him?" Scully asked him. "I didn't have anything with me. He's clearly mentally exhausted. Don't you remember how you were after your mom?"

"Yeah. I guess." Then he sank back into his files and gnawed on a new pencil.

They became oblivious to the comings and goings of the agents assigned to protect them, and immersed themselves in their work. The checks that the agents were doing became background noise in their new reality. It hadn't even registered that evening had come and it was dark outside until Mulder's stomach growled into the quiet of the room, making Scully jump at the sudden noise. She laughed, glancing up at him, and their eyes met across the room.

"Hungry?"

"Didn't even realize it was time to eat." His brows suddenly came together, wrinkling his forehead. Their eyes never left each other, each taking a read off of the other. "When was the last time the agents came through here?"

Mulder's spider senses were suddenly clanging loudly in his ears, like village alarm bells. He pulled his weapon from the holster in the small of his back and watched Scully do the same, eyes wide.

"Shit. A while."

"When did you check Will?"

"Half an hour ago."

"Too long. Go check. Be careful." Back to the shorthand monosyllabic agent-speak.

Scully rose fluidly, after laying her computer on the floor. She made her way silently down the hallway, weapon pointed at the floor in front of her. She reached Will's door, and eased it open. His empty bed mocked her, and she entered carefully, looking behind the door and into the closet before crossing to check the floor behind the bed. The only thing there was the blanket she had covered her son with, trailing from the bed onto the floor, like an arrow to the window. The window stood open, allowing a brisk breeze to enter and ripple the drape.

Then she went wild. She threw everything off of the bed, pillows, blankets, sheets. The mattress tipped up easily, although in her frenzy, she couldn't have explained why she might have been looking between the mattress and the box springs for a half-grown boy. She threw the sliding doors for the closet back and forth and looked into the empty closet several times, and the noise she was making should have wakened the neighborhood. She heard screaming.

Mulder was suddenly there beside her, and she realized that she was the one screaming, screaming her son's name, "WILLIAM! WILLIAM! WILLIAM!" over and over, until Mulder grasped her and pulled her into him. She started sobbing into his chest, beating at him, screaming still, and knew that as large and as strong as he was, he wasn't large enough to absorb her grief. But he stood there and took her blows, barely moving, gradually calming her.

Finally, when she stopped beating at him, and stood sobbing, he pushed her away, and shook her. "Scully! Stop it!" She looked up into his face, and saw a mirror of her own. His face was tear-streaked, and torn with the same anguish she felt. He shook her shoulders again. "Stop."

"Mul-der! Our son! H-He's gone!"

"Scully, I know. But we have to find him! We can't wait here! Those agents are dead! Baker and Barrett are dead! If we stay here, they'll come, the FBI will come, take us into custody, maybe lock us up, interrogate us. It will be days before we can find a trail! He'll be lost to us! We have to get out of here! Get our stuff in the car. I'm going to look for anything that might help us figure out who we're dealing with."

While Scully loaded everything into the trunk of their car, including a tool kit from the garage that she knew they would need to switch license plates soon, Mulder searched the outside of the house, the bodies of the agents, and Will's room, finding next to nothing. The agents had been killed with a knife, one strong stroke across the neck, by someone who knew what they were doing, and didn't mind doing it. It was a terrible, efficient way to kill, but personal and up-close, completely silent if done correctly. Mulder imagined that one agent hadn't come back from his rounds, and the other had gone to see why not, also meeting the same end. At that time, taking Will from his room had been child's play. Mulder kicked himself for not being more alert. If he hadn't be en working, he would have noticed the comings and goings of the two men more closely; he would have noticed right away that one hadn't come back and would have double teamed with the other to protect his son. In a way, it was his fault. But the agent should have asked him for help.

He had one unexpected stroke of luck, and found that the outside of the safe house had been fitted with video cameras. He quickly located the video recording device, and removed the disk.

He called Skinner. "We are leaving the safe house. We've been compromised, and Will has been kidnapped. We're going underground. You have two dead agents here. We are not staying because we need to get on Will's trail. We took the disk from the video cameras and will send you a copy, but we have to have it first."

"Mulder…I can't let you…"

"I know you can't. That's why we're not giving you a choice."

"Shit. Good luck."

"We'll be in touch." Mulder's voice cracked more than he wanted it to, but he knew Skinner would never mention it. He hung up and went out to the garage. Scully was in the car, in the passenger's seat, crying stoically, sitting straight up and letting the tears flow unimpeded down her cheeks. They gave her ocean eyes a crystalline quality and made them look huge. He went around to that side of the car, opened the door and pulled her up into his arms again. He held her close against him, as close as he could, like he could fix everything just like that. She felt so small, like a child. He knew she was ten time stronger than she looked. He didn't say anything, just stood there, absorbed her strength, and let his own tears fall into her hair.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Seattle

Mulder got on I5 heading south and mindlessly drove. He stopped at a random truck stop in Olympia, stealthily switched plates with a jeep, whose owners were in a restaurant, got a cup of coffee and some sunflower seeds for himself, and then kept driving. Scully was asleep and he didn't bother her. Asleep, she didn't have to deal with her feelings. When he reached an exit with a motor inn somewhere in Tumwater, he was barely able to keep his eyes open, and pulled off. He paid cash for a room and fudged the plate number a bit, knowing that it would be put in the guy's computer.

Mulder parked the car at the end, with the tail end angled away from the road, after requesting the unit there. It was one in the morning of the longest day he had lived through since his FBI career had been flushed down the proverbial toilet by his long-standing penchant for chasing the truth. Talk about being hoist by his own petard. "Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity" had been shoved up his ass at the academy and his own unflinching obsession with truth and justice had then been used to blow him right out of the FBI. Now, here they were, running again. He thought of his home on Bainbridge Island wistfully as he herded a semi-comatose Scully through the door on a ground-floor room, stuck her under the covers, locked the door, sprawled on the other side of the bed, and passed out.

The sound of rushing water in Mulder's right ear and the melodious sound of Filipino in Mulder's left ear blended seamlessly somewhere a few inches behind his nose, until he rolled over to his right side, arm seeking Scully, and messed up the whole symphony. The Filipino took over like a cell phone in a concert hall. He sat up, wondering where he was, and looked for Scully. Her side of the bed was empty and mussed, but that explained the sound of water. He still heard the Filipino conversation taking place, and decided it was coming from outside the window. He laid there, arm over his eyes, processing the preceding day.

Who would want Will? The same UFO nuts who had jacked him when he was a baby? It seemed unlikely, since they had all been fried chicken when Scully and Monica Reyes had rescued him, unharmed. Besides, he was supposed to have been cured of all of his purported "powers," that made him a hunted person to begin with. Did this have something to do with the 2012 prophecies? That seemed the most likely, given the timeline of the boy's adoptive mother's death, their meeting, and his kidnapping. The first order of business seemed to be to boot up Scully's computer and to get a look at the security tapes from the safe house. How had they been found? Through their calls to Skinner? Baker had told him that the phone was secure. He hadn't used his cell phone. Scully said her computer wireless had been disabled. Her phone was off. Did one of the agents use his cell? Skinner? Marilyn? Mulder wracked his brains for a weak point. It had to have been one of the agents or Marilyn. Skinner knew better. Mulder bet he would have told Marilyn, too. That left the agents.

Scully came out of the bathroom, hair wet from the shower, toweled dry and combed. Mulder moved his arm and looked over at his wife. She was wearing a bath towel around the middle and still had dark circles under her eyes. She looked exhausted, despite her extra sleep, and she looked unbearably sad.

"You look beautiful," he said softly.

She gave him a wan smile and came over to sit on the bed next to him. "Any brainstorms?"

"A couple of brain sprinkles." He held her hand, needing the connection.

"That's better than a drought."

"We need to look at that video tape from the safe house on your computer before we go charging off in the wrong direction. We also need to go back to Seattle."

"Why? Where are we?"

"We're in Tumwater. We need to go back because I have a safety deposit box there, in a false name, for a day like today."

"You do not."

"What did they call me, when you first met me, Dr. Scully-Mulder?"

"Spooky." The faint smile came back.

"What else did they call me?"

"Paranoid."

"We need to go back to Seattle."

"Okay." Scully sighed and went to get dressed.

Mulder rolled off of the bed, gracefully for such a big, lanky guy, visited the bathroom, and then went to the car to get Scully's computer. Scully was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt out of the suitcase Skinner had brought them when he got back, and he handed the computer to her to boot up, while he hit the shower. He was out again, dressed and roughly groomed, also in jeans, in ten minutes, leaning over Scully's shoulder, smelling not unpleasantly of toothpaste and her own shampoo. She leaned back into him, taking comfort in his warmth, and looked up into his familiar hazel eyes, shining so green this morning.

Mulder squatted down next to her, big warm hand on her neck under her hair, and looked earnestly into her big blue eyes. "We're going to find him, sweetheart." He leaned in to press his lips to hers, giving and taking solace, and then to her cheek to catch the tear that rolled there.

She wanted to believe him. She did believe him. After so many years, so many "we're going to…" statements from this man, the odds were in their favor. But, more than that, for her sanity, she actually _had_ to believe him. She pressed her hand to his cheek, traced the lines that formed the crow's foot at the corner of his eye, traced the lines that said his smile was ready to break out, ran her thumb across his lip and watched his eyes flutter closed, and then open and refocus on hers.

"There is no one in this world, Mulder, other than you, that I would believe, if they said that. I'm your one in five billion, remember?"

"Seven billion, now, right?" She laid her forehead on his shoulder, with her hand on his back. He put his head on her shoulder, with his hand on her arm, and they sat there like that, breathing each other. Scully could feel the slow beat of his heart through his back, and its strength gave her strength. God, she loved this man. She didn't know what she'd do without him.

"I love you, Mulder." It came out muffled, trapped between their two bodies, but he heard it anyway.

"I know, Scully. Let's find our son. Okay?"

She nodded on his shoulder, and lifted her head. They turned to the computer, and uploaded the video from the disk, knowing that they would have to watch the two men that they had recently gotten to know get killed.

The video was broken into eight screens. Each showed a different view around the house. The program rotated a small screen into a large player as the small screen was clicked on, and then it could be played or searched. Mulder clicked on different screens one after another, so quickly, that Scully started to get dizzy. His focus was immediate and complete. It reminded her of why she didn't watch television with the man.

"You know, we haven't eaten since lunch yesterday."

"Hmm."

"I'm going to go find some food, while you figure that out, okay?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"Then, I'm going to rob a bank, okay?"

"K."

"And buy some meth so we can party later."

"Yeh."

"Keys?"

"Hmm?"

It seemed easier to just look around, so she found his wallet and keys on the dresser, robbed him of some cash, and took his keys. As she reached the door, he finally looked up in surprise.

"Where ya going?"

"Food."

"Oh." Down again.

By the time she found a grocery, it was close to nine o'clock. She found a small Styrofoam cooler, some ice, yogurt for her, threw in some lunch meat, cheese, bread, mayo, a giant bag of sunflower seeds, a big salami, a can of nuts, some drinks and a few other things. She loaded everything into the car, put the cold stuff into the cooler, and headed back to the hotel.

"Checkout is at eleven, Mulder," she mentioned, coming into the room.

"I think I found something, Scully, take a look!" Mulder's excitement level was much higher than when she left.

"Look at this camera view. This is looking down the street. This car parks and three guys get out. They're all dressed in black, weird, even for Seattle. They walk out of camera range up here, but look at the view from the back of the house four minutes later." He switched the viewpoint, and one of the same men stealthily entered the range of the camera and hid behind a rhododendron bush on the outside border of the yard.

"And here." He switched it again. This time, the view showed the view of the back of the house, including Will's window. A figure squatted behind a tree near the edge of camera range. Mulder switched back to the view of the car. "I think I can get a plate number from that car." He zoomed the program in on the car plate, and they could make out a New Mexico plate.

"Shit," Mulder spat, as he wrote the number down.

"What?" Scully asked, alarmed.

"New Mexico, again." Mulder rubbed his face with his hand. He hadn't shaved, and it made a rough sound.

"Is that bad?"

"UFO bad. If it's aliens, it's bad. We're fighting something we don't have the tools to fight." He looked at her downcast face and regretted his truthfulness.

"I think we might."

Her quiet certitude made him look again, and realize that she was not downcast, but contemplative.

"What do you mean?"

"Just after we got you out of the brig at Quantico, you told me that you wanted to believe. You said you wanted to believe that the dead are not lost to us, and that if we listen when they speak, we'd be part of something powerful enough to save ourselves from whatever force is driving this . . . well, this prophecy, for lack of a better word."

"But that was a long time ago. I was being beaten into confessions that weren't true, starved, brainwashed, and really, really god-damned tired. I was seeing dead people. You have to cut me some slack for anything I might have said at that point.

"You don't believe those words?"

"I . . ." Mulder stopped talking and looked at Scully's face. Her earnest need made him stop to consider his words, instead of kicking out his usual flippant answer. "Yeah, I do, but . . . believing and knowing how to listen, well, those are completely different. I didn't ask for those dead people to appear to me with advice, you know. How do I access that, even if I believe that they aren't lost and that we need to listen to them? Do we stop and hold a séance?"

Scully didn't know how to answer Mulder's desperate question, and it made her feel small and helpless, and a little bit hopeless.

"Let's get on the road, and think on it," Scully told him. She reached out again and put her hand over his, squeezing his fingers when her rolled his hand over to clasp hers. He let go, shut the computer down, and got the rest of their things together to leave.

The drive back to Mulder's bank in Seattle was uneventful, proving that they hadn't been followed from the safe house. That only made Mulder worry more, because it seemed that they mattered little to the people who had taken Will. Why bother with Mulder and Scully, if Will was what they wanted, and they had him now?

Scully waited in the car while Mulder accessed his safety deposit box, and then sat in stunned silence when he presented her with the results of his foray. He handed her a valid Washington driver's license in the name of Rebecca Morris, with her photo on it, along with a passport to match. The birth certificate said she had been born in Ohio, three years later than she really had been born. His new name was John Morris, also of Ohio, and he had similar valid ID. He had also retrieved several thousand dollars in cash, two credit cards in their new names, a Glock 26, which he handed her, and a Glock 22, which he kept for himself.

"When did you do this?" Scully asked him, staring at the gun.

"I've had these identities ready since you broke me out of the brig at Quantico."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No. I knew we'd need them. I have two others in that bag, there. Now we need to rent a car and ditch this one."

Scully numbly nodded and put the ID into her pocket. The Glock had an ankle holster, and she strapped it on as a backup. Then she just sat there, unmoving.

"Hey . . ." Mulder reached for her hand. It felt so cold, that he was immediately alarmed.

"Remember the day before yesterday?" It was little more than a whisper, and she was fixating weirdly on her knees.

"I remember going to the school, meeting Will."

"Yeah. It was like a small miracle. I keep replaying it in my mind; it seems so vivid. I keep seeing his face, your face behind him, two versions of the same. I remember the moment I realized it was William. I would give anything to go back and live in that moment."

"I know, Scully." He rubbed her hand between the two of his, trying to impart some warmth.

"Let's go, Mulder. I feel like I'm about to crawl out of my skin. I feel helpless, and useless, and I feel like shooting someone. We have to make some progress today, or I don't know if I'll be able to stand it."

He looked at her a moment longer, a little alarmed at the shooting comment, and then decided that it was a relatively positive thing that she hadn't said she was "fine."

"Okay. Drop me off a block from the car rental and meet me at the Wal-Mart parking lot. We'll swap our stuff over there and ditch the rental."

They drove to the Lariat rental, and then Scully pulled over a block past the business. Mulder took his new ID and credit cards and hopped out.

"Meet you at the Wal-Mart."

"I'm staying right here, until I'm sure you aren't going to have any trouble, Mulder."

"Sure, Scully. Then you can follow me over."

The acquisition of the new rental car went off without a hitch, despite Scully's absolute certainty that using the fake credit card and ID would set off a thousand alarms and draw a half-dozen black helicopters manned by secret-ops thugs with automatic weapons, who would take them into custody and incarcerate them for 99 years under some bunker in South Dakota. But shortly after he had climbed out of the car, Mulder drove past her in a late-model maroon-colored sedan, and she pulled out behind him.

When they reached the vast parking lot of the giant box store, they found it occupied by a great number of RV's, whose owners were taking advantage of the free parking offered there. The pulled into a spot between two behemoths and took five minutes to transfer their suitcases and other belongings to the rental. Then, as unobtrusively as possible, Mulder wiped the interior of the car, so that their fingerprints wouldn't be found on the car. The feds knew that they had taken their own car; Skinner had had to tell them as much. But that information didn't necessarily need to be passed on to a bunch of local cops, who were trying to find an owner for an abandoned car.

"How would you like to go on a shopping trip, Scully?"

"To Wal-Mart?" Scully asked skeptically.

"I need to call Skinner, and I'm not about to use my phone. Let's go get a couple of burners."

It sounded like a good idea to Scully, so they walked into the big, impersonal store, and found the electronics section. They grabbed five disposable phones and five $15 phone cards. They left the store within ten minutes and sat in the parking lot, activating all five phones. Mulder powered up Scully's computer and emailed a video grab of one of the men in black to Skinner, and then powered down quickly. Then he used one of the burners to call Skinner.

"Where the hell are you, Mulder?" were the first words out of Skinner's mouth.

"At home. I have a tee-time at two, and I needed to pick up my golf clubs. Listen, I have a plate number for you. I need a name, and I need an address. I also sent a video grab to see if you can run it through ViCAP's face recognition software for me."

"I'll see what I can do, but it may take some time. I'll have to fly under the radar, since I'm not supposed to be in touch with you.

"Thanks. Here's the plate." He read the plate number off to his former boss.

"How's Scully holding up?"

"I gave her another gun. She'll be fine."

"You gave her a gun? What the f-"

"Gotta go. We'll call." Mulder hung up. He powered the phone down, and decided he would keep it for a couple more uses before throwing it away. They hadn't been on the line long enough to be traced.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Oregon

A pinpoint of pain shot from just behind his eye and split his eyeball right in half. He swore he could feel the inner jelly dripping down his left cheek. Will tried to reach up to investigate with his left hand, but found that someone was sitting on it. Intending to politely ask the person to move off of his hand, he tried to turn his head, and this had the effect of splitting the other eyeball in half. He decided at that point that it was better not to move for the moment, so he concentrated on the disconcerting feel of the eyeball jelly running down his cheeks. God, it hurt so bad, and the jelly on his cheeks felt just creepy!

"U-hhhnn . . ."

"Hey, Jeb, he's waking up. Should I shoot him again?" Shoot him? Someone shot him? The rattling voice echoed weirdly in Will's ears, distracting him momentarily from the wet, drippy feeling on his cheeks. He could almost see the voice ricocheting around his ear canal, which was good, because without eyeballs, it was going to be pretty hard to see anything else. He didn't recognize the voice, but he assumed it belonged to the heavy body sitting on his hands.

"No, let it wear off. He ain't goin' anywhere. Gag 'im if he gets loud."

"Where the hell are we anyway?"

"Somewhere in Oregon."

"Shit, Jeb, I knew that. A little more god-damned precision would be fucking nice."

"Just shut up and mind the kid."

Will was sure he was "the kid," but he wasn't sure who Jeb was, and he didn't recognize either voice. There was some kind of surface against the right side of his head, and it jounced unevenly, like someone was holding his head against a washing machine that was malfunctioning. He could tell that he wasn't sitting up, and the pain behind his eyes was receding somewhat, so that it seemed to be centered more in the middle of his brain. He wasn't even quite sure that his eyes were split open. The wet feeling was gone from his cheeks. And his eyes felt more like they were full of sand at this point. He tried to open the left one. "Shit!" He tried the right one. "SHIT!"

"Shut up, kid, or I'll hafta gag ya."

Where the hell was he? What happened? He was pretty sure he had woken in Seattle this morning. Seattle wasn't in Oregon, was it? Wasn't it in… in… he couldn't remember. What was wrong with his brain? He tried to remember waking up. A soft pillow, a chat with Donovan, a card with Fox Mulder's name on it, a walk to a library all floated before his eyes, and then the shooting pain again. Mulder! He remembered Mulder. Where the hell was Mulder? Who were these guys? He tried to pull his hand up again. It pulled against the other one. Maybe someone wasn't sitting on him. It felt more like he was either handcuffed or his hands were taped together. Drawing on his great intellect, he'd have to say that didn't bode well. His mind was starting to feel less foggy, and the events of the morning came back with greater clarity. He remembered his sudden paranoia on the way to school, his call to Mulder, his antsy and fearful walk to school. He remembered meeting Scully at the library, her beautiful and comforting smile, and then suddenly, he remembered the other man, Skinner.

Skinner's news hit him again, abruptly, with all of the heartbreak of the first time, and he nearly gagged on the grief as a sob came up in his throat. His mother! His eyes were suddenly wet, and the graininess subsided, which made his eyes feel better, but he would have traded the pain in his eyes for the pain lodged in his chest in a heartbeat. What had happened? He had sat for what seemed like hours, waiting at the library. Then, he had gotten in a car with Scully, to go to a safe house, and he remembered being at the safe house. He had been in a room sleeping, had awakened, and had heard people in the other part of the house. But his grief had been so great that he just hadn't wanted to move, so he had just rolled back over and gone back to sleep. So, how had he ended up in this car, with these men? Weren't Mulder and Scully supposed to keep him safe? Isn't that what Scully promised? God, how had his life gone from perfect to so beyond messed up in the space of twenty-four hours? It had something to do with Mulder and Scully, he was sure, but he didn't think it was their fault, exactly. There was something surrounding them, something that he could sense, but couldn't name. Their account of his first year with Scully had elements that were recurring now, and it seemed imperative that he figure out what was going on. He couldn't think clearly through his grief, so he tried to push it behind a wall in his mind, to be dealt with later.

He tried to open his eyes again, and this time, met with more success. There wasn't much to see, but the visual input helped orient him in space. Everything looked blurry. His cheek was pressed against the wiry carpet of a van, and it seemed to be a sort of bluish-gray color. It smelled almost new, but he could see trash scattered around on the floor from his vantage point. He could see two blurry feet, clad in brown boots, about two feet from his face, and some kind of metal posts, probably the supports for the van seat that the owner of the feet was occupying. The owner didn't appear to think much of safety or state laws, since the navy blue seatbelt that was supposed to be around his middle was dangling off the end of the bench.

Will tried to move his legs. The movement set off another round of alarms in his head, and he closed his eyes again against the renewed pain. The movement also revealed that he was lying in a sort of fetal position, but with his hands behind him. It wasn't comfortable, and he felt like his muscles might cramp with any more movement, so he desisted. He was incredibly thirsty, and decided to start there.

"Hey . . . " His voice seemed to barely work.

"Whaddaya want, kid?" The rattling voice didn't do as much damage to his ear canal this time, and it was absent the visual accompaniment.

"I'm really thirsty. Could I please have some water?" He decided to be polite, in the hopes that his captors wouldn't consider him a threat. His voice worked better the second time.

"Can I give him some water, Jeb?"

"Go ahead, but use that water bladder, so he doesn't have to sit up."

The man without a name leaned back over the seat, dangling the water bladder, so that he could suck on the mouthpiece. Will tried not to think about where the mouthpiece had been and gulped at the water until he had had enough. He told the man thank you. The guy just grunted in response.

Will thought about asking questions, but decide that his best bet was to let the two men think that he was asleep again, so that they would talk. He had already heard that they were somewhere in Oregon, so he knew that much. He didn't know where they were headed, or why they had taken him, but he hoped to find out.

It turned out that his captors were not great talkers; monosyllables were their thing. But Will bided his time patiently, and gleaned a few more important tidbits of information. His mind had completely cleared, and he was able to process what little he heard. They stopped in Eugene for gas, after threatening Will with a gory death if he made so much as a peep and throwing a smelly blanket over him. Will had stared at more than a few maps when he had learned that he was going away to Seattle to school, so he put his eidetic memory to use, and figured Eugene couldn't have taken less than about five hours of driving, since it was around 300 miles from Seattle. They hadn't had him long, if they had started driving right away, which made

sense, since he was just coming out of whatever drug they had given him. He searched himself mentally for sore spots, but couldn't come up with any, so couldn't tell how many injections they many have given him. He couldn't see where the information would do much good, without knowing which drug he had been given, anyway.

"Excuse me…" Will spoke up for the first time in an hour. He heard a grunt, and then springs of the van seat protested loudly as the man in it moved around.

"What?" came the gruff reply.

"Umm… I need to use the bathroom. Can we stop?" Will injected as much respect and politeness as he could muster for these captors, so that he might be able to get up and move around a bit. His legs were asleep, and he really did need to take a leak.

"Jeb, he says he's gotta piss."

"Shit."

"We can just let him go on the side of the road, right?"

"That'll work."

The van slowed and pulled off of the highway, where the man without a name got up with what seemed to Will like a lot of effort. The reason for that was clear to Will when he got his first glimpse of the man. He was very tall, but his height didn't obscure the fact that he was also very beefy. He moved heavily out of the sliding door, ducking to avoid cracking his head on the rim of the door. Once out, he reached back in, and grasped Will by the shirt, dragging him towards the door. Nothing wrong with the guy's muscles, either.

Will caught his knee on the metal leg of the van seat, and let out a muffled cry, earning him a cuff across the face from the big man.

"Keep it quiet, willya?" The man stood him on his feet, and held him up momentarily, when it was apparent that his legs were numb and wouldn't hold him. It took a few moments for the blood to start coursing back through them, and then it was a painful, prickly process.

"I'm sorry," Will whispered, "I hit my knee."

"Can you stand?" the man asked him.

"I…I think so," Will said, and found his balance after the man let go. "But I can't, uh, _go_ without my hands."

"Shit," the man said, realizing the predicament. He turned towards the other man, who was watching the process. "We need to unlock his hands so he can piss."

Will took the time to look at both faces. Jeb was smaller than the other guy, and seemed older. His face seemed like it had a lot of wrinkles, and Will put him in his fifties, between the wrinkles and the sparse grayish hair. His ears stuck out at a weird angle, and it seemed like someone had stuck them onto his head a bit too low. His teeth were horsy and stained with something brown. He couldn't get a good read on the guy's eye color, because Jeb was squinting a bit in the late afternoon sun, but he thought maybe they weren't light-colored. The other guy's face was red and puffy, and his eyes were a gray-blue color. He had straw colored hair that stuck out from under a ball cap that seemed a little too small. His lips were non-existent, which gave his whole head the look of a billiard ball with a nose.

Jeb threw the keys to the big guy, who unlocked Will's hands, and re-locked them in the front. Will turned his back to take care of his business, and didn't attempt to escape, because there didn't seem to be anywhere to go, and because he still felt weak. He was sure they would catch him, and hurt him some more, so he just finished what he was doing, and climbed back in the van.

"Can I lay on the seat?" he asked.

"On the floor," Jeb told him shortly.

Will was able to stretch his legs out, now that he was cuffed in the front, so that he wasn't as cramped as he had been. The only problem with this arrangement was that Will was now fairly comfortable. The motion of the van and the silence of the two men soon lulled him into a sort of half-sleep, where he started dreaming. The events of the past day combined in weird ways in his twilight sleep, making for an uneasy rest.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

On the Road

It was late afternoon when Mulder and Scully got back on the road heading south. Scully was skeptical about just driving randomly towards New Mexico, but Mulder needed to be doing that at least. Skinner had put out APB's on the men who had been on the surveillance video, based on their descriptions, but neither of the former agents was holding their breath on that one. They drove in silence for over an hour, each lost in thoughts perhaps best not articulated.

"Shit." The sudden syllable in the still, quiet car startled Scully and made her jump. She looked over at her partner with a scowl.

"What is it, Mulder?" She was almost afraid to ask, because every time he had a premonition or an epiphany, it turned out to be something horrible. She waited, tensed up, for him to answer her.

"I'm falling asleep."

"Oh." She felt like someone had dropped her on the ground, as her tension left her suddenly. "Let me drive. I slept enough last night for both of us. Just take a break." She took a minute to look her husband over with a critical eye, and thought that the circles beneath his eyes had deepened, fatigue had etched the crow's feet deeper, and his eyelids were indeed drooping. Expecting him to deny her the opportunity to drive, she was surprised to see him set the blinker and pull the car over to the side of the road. He turned it completely off and scrubbed a hand over his face roughly, before he looked over at her. She met his gaze.

"You okay, Scully?" There was more in the question than just an inquiry about her readiness to drive. She reached out to squeeze his hand.

"I'm fine. We just need to keep moving."

Mulder rolled his eyes. He hated it when she said, "I'm fine," and he stared at her a little harder, like he could break through to her real thoughts with some kind of mind-power.

"Mulder. I'm FINE. I've got this. Stop looking at me like you think I'll suddenly start shrieking and running down the middle of the road in my underwear." Scully peered hard into Mulder's eyes, until he seemed to be satisfied with her general mental health, and then squeezed his hand again.

"Okay," he acknowledged, "although that scenario might not be so bad…"

"You are bat-shit crazy, Mulder."

"It's been implied."

"I'm pretty sure it's been stated outright in triplicate, and filed somewhere in the bowels of the J. Edgar Hoover building," she said.

They got out of the car and circled it to switch places. Mulder took a moment to look around him. The sun was setting in a spectacular blaze over the ocean, and he paused to appreciate that the world just went on with an unrivaled indifference to their suffering. Sighing, he climbed into the passenger side, used his keen powers of observation to take note of the fact that his knees were up by his ears, and reached under the seat to scoot it back to accommodate his long legs. He then laid the back down and rolled up his jacket to serve as a pillow. Within moments of Scully starting the car, Mulder was out like a light.

Scully shook her head and turned the radio on low to keep her company, listening to a talk show about the plight of several species of frogs in the South American rain forests.

_ In his dreams, Mulder started seeing a strange stream of images, starting mysteriously with an infestation of poisonous frogs. He was lying on a bed in a hotel room when a poison dart frog landed square in the middle of his chest, startling him awake. Immediately recognizing that he was in danger, Mulder froze, hoping the frog would simply hop away before making contact with his skin. It sat there and stared at him, throat pumping ominously. Before it could hop away, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, several other poisonous species decorating the lamp shade, and decided his best bet would be to run. So, he jumped up from the bed and made a mad dash for the door, feeling the last earthly specimens of several species squish unceremoniously beneath his nicely polished shoes, which he had been wearing in bed, for some reason. The air was suddenly filled with the sound of shrieking frogs. He made it out of the door, and noticed that he was at a BP gas station in Eugene, Oregon. There was a dark blue van with a gas hose snaking out of the tank, and the man at the pump had mouse ears stuck onto his head in the wrong place. Mulder stood and stared at him for a moment, thinking that the man looked familiar. After all, how could you forget a man with ears like that? So, he wandered over, scraping the frogs off of his shoes as he went, which made him walk a little like a duck and left damp, frog-colored smears on the pavement behind him. _

_ "Do I know you?" Mulder asked the man._

_ "I'm Jeb," said the guy. "This is my van, but you can't look inside."_

_ "My mistake," said Mulder. "I thought you looked familiar, but I don't know anyone named Jeb. I'm looking for a little boy."_

_ "There was a little boy in my van," said Jeb, "but he had to pee, so we moved his handcuffs."_

_ "Mine didn't have handcuffs," said Mulder. "Thanks."_

_ Mulder wandered over to another island, where he noticed Scully waiting for him in a rental car. He tried to get in, but she rolled the windows up, locked the doors, and drove away, shrieking that he was crazy and that he smelled like dead frogs._

"JESUS!" Mulder almost hit the windshield, as he jack-knifed upwards out of his dream.

The car swerved when he yelled, and Scully yelped at the same time.

"Mulder! What the hell? That's TWICE!"

"Scully! Pull over!" Mulder was frantically clawing at his seatbelt and trying to put his seat upright. She didn't ask questions, but skidded to a stop on the shoulder of the busy freeway. He threw the door open and leapt out to vomit violently on the side of the road.

Scully was out of the car without any further questions, and she ran around to the other side. She opened the back door to root around in her suitcase, casting concerned looks over her shoulder at her husband, who was bent over double, breathing like he'd just finished a mile sprint. She finally came up with a small towel, which she handed to her white-faced husband. Mulder sat back down on the passenger seat, shaking, and wiped his face with the towel.

"Mulder –"

"I dreamed –" He shook his head.

"It was just a dream. You can't –" Her brows were drawn together in concern, as she put her hand on his forehead. She felt only sweat against her fingers.

"There were a lot of frogs. They were in Eugene, getting gas. It was a BP station. It was only a couple of hours ago. They're driving a blue van. I - I couldn't see the license plate. His name is Jeb, the driver, the driver is Jeb. His ears, he has weird ears. They have Will handcuffed." Once they started pouring out, Mulder couldn't stop the machine-gun sentences. He wasn't looking at her; his eyes were darting around, looking at things she couldn't see.

"There were frogs in Eugene?" Scully looked at him incredulously. She didn't know what to say. He had obviously been dreaming, but where was this coming from? She had been through too many very weird cases with this man, seen one too many implausible things, to discount anything out of hand, but…

She knelt before him and reached out to put her hands over his, where they were wringing at the towel. They stilled immediately at her calm, warm touch. His eyes stopped zinging around and landed on hers. He took a deep breath and clung to his anchor.

"Scully…" he whispered.

"Okay. Slow down, and tell me what you dreamed. The whole thing, Mulder."

He started with the frogs in the hotel room, which made her smile, and she told him that she had had the radio on a talk show about frogs. That made him smile a little, too, and he went on to describe the rest of the dream. The rest of the dream gave Scully pause, and she held his earnest eyes as she thought.

"How far are we from Eugene?"

"Do you believe me?" The hope in his eyes was almost painful.

"I – I don't NOT believe you, just yet," she said carefully, looking down at their hands, still clasped. The loss of her gaze made him a little dizzy, and he focused on their clasped hands as well. "It won't cost us anything to stop at whatever BP stations there are along the highway in Eugene. Maybe they'll have video. We can do a little investigative work to confirm or rule out the existence of such a van, at least."

"Ah, there's my scientist," Mulder quipped weakly. Scully looked at his face, noting that the color was better now, and she stood up. Rummaging in the back seat again, she came out with a bottle of water for him and handed it over. He stood up, and rinsed the bad taste out of his mouth, spitting the water out onto the gravel, before chugging the rest of the bottle down. He noticed that Scully was looking at him again, with a faraway, contemplative look on her face.

"What?"

"I don't know, Mulder. Just wondering, where would that kind of information come to you from? I mean, the last time you had dreams that led you somewhere, I couldn't tell if you had them because your subconscious mind was putting information together and feeding it to you in the form of dreams, or if you were somehow 'linked' to the murderer. I know that you can understand where I would have a problem with that second scenario, absent any hard data, but you _did_ have a connection to that particular guy. So, I'm just thinking ahead here, if we find that this dream was somehow clairvoyant, where did the information come from? The only person you've met in this scenario is Will, and that was only briefly."

His eyes flew to hers. "What are you saying, Scully?"

"Nothing, yet. I'm just…

"…thinking out loud?"

"Yeah."


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Oregon

Will woke with a start from a strange dream, feeling distinctly nauseous. Tenacious bits of the dream clung to his consciousness like ocean foam: Mulder under attack from poisonous Amazon basin frogs in some nameless hotel room, Jeb holding a weird conversation with the ex-FBI agent at a gas station, Scully screaming at Mulder and driving away from him. He brought his linked hands up to his face and tried to scrub away the lingering memories of the dream. He decided that the weirdness of the dream must be some left-over effect of whatever drug that they had given him. As the thought occurred to him, a flash of anger washed over him, at the thought of them violating his mind and his body like that. He was never sick, so he had never been given any sort of drug before, and he had made a conscious decision to never use drugs recreationally.

Awake now, he laid and listened to the silence in the van. Surely, the men would have to rest at some point. He looked under the seat, and noticed that there weren't any feet there anymore. Puzzled, he listened some more. He finally made out the sound of rhythmic, deep breathing; one of them was asleep. _Crap, _he thought, _they don't plan to stop at all._ Scooting carefully, so that he didn't alert the driver to his motions, he managed to wrangle himself into an upright seated position on the floor between the two bench seats, facing the rear doors. It was a nice change of posture, and he stretched his legs out straight.

Suddenly, Will noticed that he could read the highway signs of the northbound lane from his new position. The sun was now below the horizon, and only the lingering dusk lit the sky, but the signs were lit by the headlights of passing cars, and Will was able to make out the words, "Grants Pass" on one sign and "Redwood, next exit" on another. He closed his eyes and brought a picture of his map before his eyes. Grants Pass was almost to California. Where the hell were they heading?

Will watched the passing signs for a bit, before the action started to bore him. To pass the time in the oppressively silent van, he called to mind a page out of his calculus book, and started practicing derivatives in his mind.

XXXXX

Mulder was wide awake, now, and sat in the passenger's seat, tapping his long fingers on the door handle. His stomach had recovered from its violent emptying, and now he was hungry.

"Mulder. Stop it." The curt tones caught his attention, and he turned his head towards the petite driver.

"Stop what, Scully?"

"STOP that incessant tapping before I leave you in the ditch."

"Sorry. Have we got any food left?" He moved his hand to the inside of his left knee, and continued rapping out a rhythm silently there, where she couldn't see him. He couldn't sit still, and it was driving him crazy.

"No, you want to stop? We're almost to Salem."

"Yeah, but just a drive-through. I don't want to waste any time."

"Yuck. Can we just stop at a grocery store?"

"I don't care. Craving rabbit's food, again?" Mulder teased her.

"No, I'm just not going to eat burgers every day. We'll both die of coronary artery disease and never see Will again." She was glad to see that he had regained his sense of humor. It worried her when he was bad enough to skip the joking around.

"I'm pretty sure that takes years, Scully."

"How do you know? You aren't a doctor." Scully spotted a red Safeway sign off the freeway, and signaled to take the exit. "How far is Salem from Eugene, Mulder?"

Instead of answering, Mulder pulled a map out of the glove compartment. There was in inordinate amount of rattling, as Mulder unfolded the map, flipped it over a few times, turned it around upside down and then right side up again. "Umm, looks like a little over an hour."

"So that puts us about three hours behind them, if your dream was the real thing." Scully glanced over at her husband, and noticed that his fingers were still tapping against his knee. She reached across the console and took his hand, gently squeezed it, and then let go to navigate into the parking lot in front of the grocery store.

"Let's make this quick."

Less than ten minutes later, they were back to their car, loading their purchases into the back seat. Scully refreshed the ice chest by dumping out the cold water, and replacing the volume with ice. Then she threw the cold stuff in on top of the ice, including a couple of cans of soda.

Back on the highway, Mulder reached for Scully's hand and they continued on down the highway. Each was mentally sorting through bad premonitions, but they stayed connected physically by the warmth of their hands touching. The hour it took to get to the outskirts of Eugene seemed interminable, and Mulder's pile of sunflower seed husks grew quickly. To keep her mind off of the drive, Scully even helped herself to a few as Mulder raised his eyebrows at her.

"Picking up bad habits, Scully?"

"Is this a bad habit? Sunflower seeds have all kinds of health benefits…"

Mulder's groan cut her off. "Don't take the pleasure out of my only vice by lecturing me on how great it is for you!"

"Like you'd ever give it up. Ha. Your only vice?"

Mulder was quiet for a few minutes, and then flipped his seatbelt off, turned around in his seat, and started rummaging around in the back seat.

"What in the world are you doing?" Scully looked at his awkward position in the seat. "If I had to stop, you'd fly through the windshield butt-first!"

An indistinct rumble was her only answer. She concentrated on the road, the vision of Mulder stuck in the windshield in such a crazy position making her smile, although she knew it wasn't a laughing matter. Finally, he turned around with one of the burner phones in hand, settled back in his seat and fastened his seatbelt again.

"Who are you calling?"

"Skinner, for one, to see if there are any updates. Then, I need to get in touch with Marilyn. Should I call your clinic, too?"

"Probably should. This isn't going to be resolved quickly, I'm afraid."

"I already had them cancel appointments for this week."

"I know. I should still talk with them."

Mulder tapped in Skinner's cell phone number from memory. The phone kept ringing without an answer, so he tried the home number. Skinner finally answered, sounding very tired.

"Walter Skinner."

"Hey, Skinner."

"Mulder, do you know what time it is in DC?"

"What the hell are you doing in DC?" Mulder exchanged a look with Scully, who was only hearing Mulder's side.

"I was pulled back here. But I'm still working this case. I have two names for you, from the surveillance video. One is Jebediah Jones, who has a record a mile long, mostly for B&E and related stuff. The other is Joshua Edwards, a dishonorably separated Army Ranger. I haven't been able to get paper on him, other than that."

"Wait." Mulder rubbed his forehead as he interrupted Skinner. "Did you say Jebediah? Isn't Jeb short for Jebediah?"

"Uh, I guess so. What have you got?"

"Can't say yet, with any certainty. What else?"

"I got an address for that plate you gave me." Skinner read the address off to him, which was in Gallup, New Mexico, while Mulder scribbled it down on his notepad.

"That's close to where Albert Hosteen lived."

"Yeah.'"

"Hmm. Got anything else? How can you run this thing from DC? The Bureau is on the kidnapping, right? I mean, we are pretty sure we're on their tails, and we're in Oregon, now, near Eugene."

"The Bureau is on the case. They're assuming that there was transport across state lines. How do you know you're on their tails?"

"Can't say yet, with any certainty."

"Stop saying that. You sound like an FBI agent. Tell me what you have."

"You really don't want to know. It sounds a lot like an X-file."

"Shit, you're right. Don't tell me until you're sure. What does Scully think about it?"

"She's . . . skeptical."

"Really. That's surprising."

"Funny, Skinner. Well, keep digging, and I'll keep you posted on our progress. The Bureau isn't after _us_, are they?"

"You're considered witnesses to a crime, but they don't suspect you. Especially after that video grab."

"Okay, thanks for the update. Talk to you later." Mulder closed the phone, and sat silently for a moment.

Scully glanced over at him. His brow was furrowed, and he was fiddling with the phone, as he sat staring out of the windshield.

"What did he say, Mulder?"

He didn't look at her, but said, "We have an address for the plate, and he had two names for us."

"I heard you say Jebediah. Jeb was the name from your dream. That's a little . . ."

"Spooky?"

"Hey, you said it, but yeah. Spooky works."

"Look, there's a BP station." Mulder pointed at the exit sign, which listed the businesses available at the next exit. "Let's start checking them. I'll call Marilyn later."

"What do we ask? 'Hey, seen any dark blue vans with handcuffed kids in the last few hours?'"

"Well, I thought I'd start easy and just ask about the van."

"Chicken-shit."

"I know. I can barely leave the house in the morning, except that I know you're there to keep me safe."

"And here I was, thinking you were keeping _me_ safe." She negotiated the turn into the BP station.

"Always, Scully."

Smiling at him, she asked, "So, does this look familiar?"

"All BP stations look the same, and I don't see any frog-colored footprints on the pavement. Let's just ask the guy inside."

They parked in front of the store and got out of the car. Mulder looked from there back towards the pumps, trying to remember his dream.

"I wonder how many BP stations there are along the highway," he mused.

"You had to ask that. I was content to imagine there was only this one."

"Keeping you on your toes, Scully."

Entering the store, Scully looked around, thinking she'd get a cup of coffee while she was here. Mulder made his way to the checkout, and she followed along behind him. The store was very clean, and everything was done in green and yellow, of course. It assaulted the senses in a way that was not pleasant at this hour. Mulder pulled out his private investigator's identification.

"Hi there," he greeted the clerk. He showed his credentials, and asked, "Do you think I could ask you a few questions?"

"Sure, man," said the clerk, glancing at the credentials, and then over at Scully. Scully looked him over and noted that he looked clear-eyed, relatively neatly dressed, and alert. He had longish brown hair, secured in a ponytail, a strange-looking spiral earring in his right ear, and several tattoos along his bare forearms.

"How long have you been on shift?"

"Came on at noon."

"Do you have surveillance video that records the pumps?"

"Sure do."

"Do you remember seeing a dark blue van getting gas about three hours ago?"

"Shit, man, I don't stand here and watch the pumps, you know. I don't remember seeing one, but I've been busy in here with customers, so I can't be sure." He seemed contrite about not having noticed.

"So, can I take a look at the security tape from about 4 hours ago until about 2 hours ago?" Mulder asked the kid.

"I guess so. I'll show you where the video equipment is." He took Mulder back into a back room and pointed out the various parts of the surveillance equipment.

"I've got it from here. I'll leave everything the same way I found it." He sent the young man back out to the register with a smile that said he was trustworthy. Mulder spent about ten minutes just finding the correct portion of the tape, and then ran through three hours of tape at breakneck speed. He saw no sign of a dark blue van on any of it.

"Crap," Mulder said under his breath. "Too much to hope for, I guess." He put the tape back where it had been, and went back out to find Scully nursing a coffee and chatting with the kid. The cashier's face was flushed with the excitement of being grilled by a PI, and with the pure pleasure of just sitting and chatting with a beautiful woman.

"Find anything?" Scully asked him this, even though she had read his face already, and it wasn't telling her that he had been triumphant.

"Nah. Ready? Hey, did you get me one of those?"

Scully turned and picked up a large cup, and handed it to him. "Of course I did. Every time you fall asleep, you wake up screaming and scare the shit out of me. No more sleeping for you."

Mulder rolled his eyes at her and turned to the cashier. "Where's the next BP station?"

"It's about two miles up on the right hand side of the highway."

"Listen, man, thanks for your help." Mulder held his hand out to the kid, and shook it in farewell. He and Scully walked back out to the car, and he got in the driver's seat. He removed his knee from his eye socket by adjusting the seat backward by a foot, and started the car.

The next gas station was also a bust, even though Mulder had no trouble getting information out of the girl manning the register. She gazed at him, dewy eyed, until he felt intensely uncomfortable. She offered to stay in the tiny office while he went through the tape, and Mulder thought he might have to physically remove her, when the chime sounded to let her know she had to turn on a gas pump.

Scully was giving the girl the evil eye, when Mulder came back out looking dejected at his continued lack of success.

"Let's not linger here, Mulder. I found out how far it is to the next BP."

Scully never stopped glaring at the girl.

"Okay, Scully. Let's hit the road." Mulder thanked the girl for her help, avoiding her adoring eyes, as they walked out the door and back to the car.

"Sheesh," Mulder said, as they backed out. "That was weird." At these words, Scully looked mollified.

"Please tell me that I never look at you like that," Scully begged him.

"Not lately. But there were a few times, back in the first couple of years after we met, that I thought I'd have to file a sexual harassment suit." Mulder lamented, straight-faced.

"Did I tell you I was carrying?"

"No, and I forgot that I even gave you an _extra_ gun."

"Might be a good time to remember that."

"Got it."

Mulder spotted the next BP, then, surprised that it was so close. He suddenly felt a buzzing in his head, and all of his senses were wide awake. Scully immediately noticed his change in demeanor.

"What is it, Mulder?"

"I think this is it," he told her. The colors of the station seemed brighter and closer, and the tingling at the back of his neck told him that his spider senses were on high alert. He moved his head back and forth, and time seemed like it was progressing in slow motion. In his mind's eye, his dream came back to him, and he matched up the shape of the trees behind the station, the pattern of store signs from the next block, and the shape of the large oil blot on the pavement by the gas pumps.

"This is the one."


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

"This is the one." His face felt like plastic.

"How do you know, Mulder?" Scully studied his face closely, and noticed the hyper-alert look that always accompanied the activation of his spider senses.

"I can. . . feel it. The trees match. The signs match. I don't know, I just know." He felt a bit impatient with her, and wasn't sure why. Certainly, he was expecting her to take the opposite side of the argument, but that was nothing new. He always expected that. But he suddenly felt very irritable, and his stomach lurched again. He tamped down on the feeling of impatience, and kept scanning the area.

As he steered into the station, time seemed to go back to normal. His stomach felt better, and the feeling of annoyance went away. They parked, and got out. Mulder scanned the station from his new vantage point and what he saw cemented his feeling that they would discover something here. Everything looked desperately familiar.

The cashier was a middle aged woman, with grey-streaked black hair, which was fastened in a messy knot at the back of her head. She was a very small person, but wore clothing that was for a much bigger person, which hung off of her frame and made her look like a bag lady. Her very dark eyes were dancing with good humor as she greeted them.

"Hi, there! How are you folks doing this evening?" She had a southern drawl that was a bit out of place so far north, and it made both Scully and Mulder smile warmly at her, despite their dire mission. It reminded Mulder of his secretary.

"We're fine, ma'am." Mulder had his PI license out to show her, as he asked, "Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?"

"Not at all, sir. It's been pretty dull all day."

"So, you've been here on shift for a while?"

"Yep, since noon. I think the other gas stations were getting all of my business today."

"You might have noticed the van I'm looking for, then. It was dark blue, and the driver was a bit strange looking. His ears were stuck on too low." Mulder looked at the woman hopefully.

"Hey, I remember that guy! I thought the same thing, that his ears were weird. He was here in the afternoon."

"Could I take a look at the surveillance tapes?"

"You bet, come on back." The tiny woman came out from behind the register to lead them back to the office.

Scully hadn't moved during the whole exchange. She stood there looking dumbfounded to realize that her husband's dream had some basis in reality. She still stood there, staring after him, while Mulder made his way back through the store. He noticed she wasn't with him, and stopped to turn back.

"Scully?"

"Shit, Mulder," she burst out, her eyes wide with the shock of the whole thing. "You were right!"

"Scully, when have I ever been wrong?"

The crazy question broke Scully loose from her frozen state, and she huffed in a combination of disbelief and annoyance. She started after him.

"You're always wrong, Mulder. You keep getting me and you mixed up."

"That's not very nice."

"Huh." Scully felt a little giddy at the thought that they may be moments away from a real lead on their quest. She caught up with him and grasped his warm, big hand in hers, to keep herself grounded. He squeezed it and kept walking.

The cashier showed them the equipment, identical to the other two stations, and Mulder told her that he knew what to do. She left them to go back and man the cash register.

Mulder queued up the first tape, and zoomed through it at breakneck speed, almost certain that he was starting too early, but not wanting to miss the clues if he was wrong. It was at the beginning of the third tape that the blue van made its appearance.

"That's it, Scully. That's the guy!" He pointed to the man on the tape, and he did, indeed, have the weirdest set of ears that Scully had ever seen. "Holy shit, Scully! I dreamed this!" Although he knew it wouldn't be on the tape, he half-expected to see himself walk into the frame to question the guy. But, all he saw was the guy getting gas, leaning into the van to say something to the other occupant, and then walking into the station store. The other guy in the van seemed vast, although all that Mulder could see in the tape was a shadow. He just seemed too big to be one person. There was no sign of a boy in the van, but he wasn't surprised. He was sure that they would have him on the floor, unseen.

"Can you zoom in on the plate, Mulder?"

He used the video equipment to do as she had asked, and they were able to read and record the plate number. It was another New Mexico plate.

"I'm calling Skinner right away to get an BOLO out on this guy."

"Does this equipment allow a photo to be printed?"

"Doesn't look like it, but I'll tell Skinner that the FBI needs to take custody of it, as evidence. He'll get a warrant." I'll have the clerk guard it until then.

Mulder suddenly couldn't breathe, as the import of the last ten minutes became clear.

"My dream . . . Scully, where could it have come from?"

"I can't even hazard a guess without more evidence, but I have a few thoughts."

"What?"

"I'm not even going to verbalize them right now."

"Scully, you drive me crazy."

"Well, I knew there was a reason for you to be like you are. Let's go. You can call Skinner."

They made their way back outside, handing the video off to the clerk. She assured them that it would be locked up safely, ready for the FBI to pick up later. Mulder grabbed one of the burner phones as soon as he got back to the car, and dialed Skinner's number, staying outside of the car so there would be no radio interference. Scully climbed into the passenger side, and sat staring into nothing.

A garbled voice answered on the fourth ring, "Skinner."

"Hey, it's Mulder. Get a pen."

"How many more times are you going to wake me up tonight, Mulder?"

"As many times as it takes to find my son."

"Alright, I'm with you. Go ahead."

Mulder read the license plate number to him, and had him repeat it back to him. He told him about the tape, and that it needed to be in FBI custody ASAP. Then, he described the driver, and Skinner made a strange noise.

"How did you find this guy, Mulder? That's Jebediah Jones. I have a photo of the guy, and you just described him to a T."

"He goes by Jeb."

"Mulder."

"Okay, I'm going to tell you this, and I want you to think back to all of the much stranger things that I've told you over the years, before you discount it.

"I'm listening."

"I have some kind of mental connection to Will, I think. Scully won't verbalize it, but I know she's thinking the same thing. I had a dream, where I encountered Jeb at this BP, where we are sitting right now. I saw him as clear as day, and I've never seen the guy before. I also saw his vehicle, which is a dark blue Chevy passenger van, an older model, I think. It's the kind with the windows all around, not an enclosed van. In our conversation, he mentioned that he had a boy with him in handcuffs.

"It seemed like information that Will might have, that he might have seen, if he was with them. I didn't think much of it, until we started canvassing gas stations in Eugene, where this dream scenario took place. After considering a number of possibilities, it seems most likely that I have connected in some way with my son. If the connection persists, he probably won't like me much when he gets to be a teenager, and I can spy on him from within his own head."

Skinner grunted in response to the humor, and then was silent.

"Scully's still skeptical?" he finally asked.

"I think she believes, but doesn't want to without hard evidence, which she won't get. You know how she is. She thinks that if she doesn't acknowledge something out loud, she hasn't committed to it. I don't know how much more evidence she wants than to have the information from my dream verified."

"Huh. Can't say either. I'm going to get this BOLO out. When did you say he went through there?"

Mulder gave him the time stamp on the tape, and reminded him to cover all of the major routes between Oregon and New Mexico a little more carefully.

"Yeah, they'll probably set up some kind of road block or surveillance points. What we don't want is any kind of high-speed chase, if Will is in the car with them. So, we'll get this information in the system. Keep me informed, Mulder. I can't help you, if you don't let me know what's going on."

"You just complained about me calling so late."

"Keep me informed, no matter what time. We need to find your son."

XXXXXX

In the middle of a particularly complex mental calculus problem, Will felt the motion of the van change. He had been staring vacantly out of the back and side windows from his vantage point on the floor of the van, taking note of the signs on the other side of the highway, while his mind was otherwise occupied. But the change in motion prompted him to abandon the calculus problem and pay closer attention.

The van slowed as it made its way down an off-ramp, and he strained to see some kind of identifying sign from the other side of the highway. There was nothing to see, until they got onto the new road. After a few miles, the headlights from an oncoming car lit up the highway sign, and Will took note. It was a black and white sign with a large 89 on it. Unfamiliar with any signs other than the red, white, and blue interstate highway signs, he wasn't sure what this one meant. Was it a state highway? He decided that it probably was, and filed the information away, not knowing what he'd use it for. There was also a sign on the opposite side of the road declaring that it was 4 miles to Mt. Shasta.

_ That must be the town we just came through, _he thought. _When will we ever stop?_

The ringing of a cell phone broke through Will's musings. Hearing only one side of the conversation wasn't helpful at all, but he could tell that Jeb was pretty angry about something.

"Edwards."

A sleepy grunt was the only answer that Jeb got from the dozing man on the van seat in front of Will. _Aha! Now I know the other guy's name!_

"EDWARDS."

"What?"

"We have to ditch the van."

"What are you talking about?" Edwards sounded more awake now.

"My contact at the FBI just called. He said that they somehow made us, and now there's a BOLO out on this van. We have to get rid of the damned thing."

"Shit. How do we do that?"

"Shut up and let me think."

Edwards didn't say anything else. Will could feel the seat moving a bit, as the big man changed position, since his back was leaning up against it. He waited.

"What's the next town?"

Edwards consulted a map, from the sound of rustling paper that Will heard. "Uh, McCloud's pretty close."

"We'll find some kind of big parking lot, leave the van, and steal a car. Look for a truck stop or something."

There was silence for some time before Will started seeing random street lights along the side of the highway, like they were lighting up cross streets.

Finally, Jeb said, "There. A truck stop."

He pulled the van into the vast parking lot, and drove around it slowly. He pulled into a spot that was well away from the main bustle of activity.

"Wait here," he ordered Edwards. The sound of the door opening and closing reached Will's ears.

"When we move you," said Edwards, speaking to him for the first time in hours, "move quickly and don't make a scene. You don't want to get hurt, and you don't want us to hurt your new friends, Scully and Mulder."

"Okay." The threat of harm didn't seem idle, coming from the mountain of a man sitting in front of him.

Edwards slid on his seat towards the side door of the van, opened it and climbed laboriously out. Coming around to the back of the vehicle, he opened the door, pulled a tool chest towards himself, and rummaged around in it. He pulled out a screwdriver and quickly closed the door. Will got up on his knees and peeked out the window. He saw Edwards approaching a car that was parked a few spots away, and crouch down behind it. When he stood again, he had the plate in his hands. He came back to the van, removed the plate on it, and replaced it with the stolen one. One more trip to the other car finished the task. The van's plate was now part of a car that, more than likely, would pull out of the truck stop and drive away. It might give them a few hours to move away from the area, before police became aware that the object of the recent BOLO was sitting in the parking lot at a truck stop. Edwards started back towards the van, and Will slid back down to his spot.

As Edwards was getting back in the van, a large black SUV with a vanity plate that read, 'BUFENUF,' pulled up behind it. After confirming that the driver was Jeb, Edwards told Will, "Get over here, kid."

The transfer was made quickly, and the van was abandoned. At least in the new vehicle, Will was allowed to sit on the third row seat. The windows were tinted a dark black, and no one could see into the SUV. The three of them were back on the road within five minutes of stopping at the truck stop. They continued on into the night, moving steadily towards their goal: a small town in New Mexico.

The nighttime darkness made it difficult for Will to see anything. His boredom became sleepiness, and he tipped over in the long seat, giving in to the biological need with stark reluctance. His sleep was restless, and marked again by strange, vaguely disturbing dreams.

_Will was running. He was running as fast as he could, because Edwards and Jeb were right behind him, carrying very big guns. Edwards was screaming at Will, but at first, Will couldn't make out the words._

_ "Hurry up! You have to change your shoes in McCloud, and if you tell anyone, we'll kill Mulder!" Edwards yelled at him._

_ "But I can't run without my shoes!" Will yelled back at him. _

_ "We'll get new ones on highway 89! Go faster, Mulder and Scully are right behind us!" Edwards screamed, egging him on to run faster._

_ Suddenly, they were at a vast parking lot, with a tiny café at one end. There was no way that all of the drivers of the hundreds of cars in the parking lot would ever fit into that tiny café, thought Will, running for his life._

_ "Stop here! This one will do."_

_ "But, I thought I was getting new shoes," said Will, who noticed that Jeb was indicating a big black SUV with a plate on it that read, 'BUFENUF.'_

_ "Stop yer whining back there. This ain't no pleasure cruise." _

_ So, Will climbed in and looked into the cargo area. Mulder was strapped into the area by ratchet straps, and wore handcuffs just like Will's. There was piece of cactus stuffed into his mouth to keep him from talking. He was breathing laboriously through his nose, and begging Will with his eyes to loosen the ratchet straps, but Will knew he couldn't reach them. Besides, the guns were scaring him. _

_ Jeb climbed into the back with him, and told him to go switch the plates on the cars in the parking lot._

_ "What, all of them? I thought we were in a hurry!"_

_ "Just get started. Start with that blue van right there. My contact at the FBI is looking for that van."_

_ Will looked out the window and saw the indicated van. He grabbed the screwdriver that Mulder handed him, and climbed out of the SUV, wearing new sneakers._


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Mulder awakened with a start, feeling nauseated again, but not nearly as much as the last dream. He verbalized the nausea with an indistinct, "Uhhhh."

Scully looked over at him in the darkness, from her spot behind the wheel.

"What is it, Mulder?"

"Pull over, please." He said it faintly, as he leaned forward over his painful stomach, clutching at it with his arms, and rested his forehead on the dash.

Scully steered onto the emergency shoulder, her forehead wrinkled with worry. She kept glancing over at her distraught husband, knowing what was coming this time.

After she stopped, Mulder pushed his door open, but he didn't bolt out, like this time. He just took off his seatbelt, put his feet out the door, and sat there, hunched over. His breathing was unsteady, as he tried to keep control of his stomach. Scully opened her door and got out, crossed in front of the car, and came over to the passenger side. She stood out of the way of any possible liquefied projectiles, and leaned against the back door. Reaching over, she softly combed the back of Mulder's hair with her fingers, soothing him in the only way she knew. His breathing slowly calmed and he felt the nausea fading.

"Scully." Still not very loud, but she heard him over the passing traffic.

"I'm here, Mulder."

"It was another dream." Her heart went out to him in his suffering.

"I know." She waited.

Mulder took a few more breaths, before continuing. He straightened up a bit, testing himself.

"Highway 89. They traded their van in a truck stop parking lot. Black SUV, "BUFENUF" was the plate."

"I'm going to call Skinner."

"They knew somehow." Mulder was thinking clearer now, and tried to remember every detail of the dream, tried to fix it in his conscious mind.

"Knew what, Mulder?" Scully brushed his hair back off of his forehead, and clung to his eyes.

"They knew that we made their van."

"What? But that means . . ."

"They've got a mole."

Scully pushed away from the side of the car, and whipped the back door open. She rummaged around in Mulder's bag, and came up with a phone. Quickly, she dialed Skinner. Impatient, she started pacing back and forth while the phone on the other end rang. Her path was so precise that she looked like she was marching.

"Uh. Skinner." His voice seemed groggy and deeper than usual.

"It's Scully. Mulder told you about his dream?" She was brusque in her keenness to get to the point.

"Yeah."

"He had another one. Are you awake?"

"I am now." Scully heard him scrambling around to find a pen. "What did he tell you?"

"They somehow found out that the FBI had their plate number. They switched vehicles near McCloud, California. They are now driving a black SUV with plates, 'B-U-F-E-N-U-F,' and we think they may have a mole."

"Shit," said Skinner, as he scribbled the information down. "Shit," he repeated. "That makes it really hard to put out a BOLO."

"I know," Scully agreed. She was still pissed off at Skinner, because he hadn't told her that he was having her son watched, but also because he had been so ham-handed in telling her child about the death of his mother. She was having trouble keeping that emotion separate from what she needed to do. She pushed the unwelcome feelings aside, and said, "Maybe we can just alert local LEOs, and only have them give the information to units on that road."

"Yeah, but not over the radio." Skinner was silent for a moment, before he said, "See if you can get any more details out of Mulder, and I'll contact CHP and the local guys and let them know what to do. Give me your phone number."

She relayed the information, and then abruptly told Skinner, "Bye." Scully closed the phone, and turned back to Mulder, putting the back of her small hand on his brow. "How are you? Can we go?"

"I'm okay. We really need to fly, see if we can catch up with them."

Moments later, Scully had the pedal almost to the floor, sending the rental car careening down the highway into the night. Her mind was awash with multiple possible scenarios, most of them involving the apprehension of the criminals who had her son in custody. None of those scenarios had the kidnappers coming out of it undamaged or alive. She was breathing like she had run ten miles, and Mulder glanced over at her with concern.

"Scully, you sound like a freight train."

"I can't help it, Mulder. I'm really busy imagining a thousand different ways to kill two men."

"I'll come visit you in prison." He heard her breathing even out somewhat, and said, "You know that we need to get at least one of them alive, right?"

"I know. Why can't you just let a girl lose herself in her fantasies? You just have to butt in and ruin the whole thing. You're a terrible husband."

"I know. And you're a terrible wife. Most guys only have to deal with too many charges on the credit cards. But me? I have to sit around and worry about my wife chasing criminals across the continent, with two concealed weapons and blood in her eye. I have to worry about my wife committing numerous murders under the noses of several different police entities and federal agents. My life sucks."

"You poor thing. Go back to sleep and let me fantasize."

XXXXX

It was silent in the black SUV, and had been since they left the truck stop. Jeb was still driving, and was concentrating on keeping the vehicle right at the speed limit. He was getting pretty tired and was thinking of asking Edwards to drive. He reached up to rub the back of his neck. Except for the recent snafu with the van, he felt pretty good about how the job had gone. He shuddered to think how things might have gone, if they hadn't had the contact at the FBI. The kid was no trouble at all; he had been quiet and cooperative, even at the truck stop, where Jeb was thoroughly surprised that he had caused no issues. What the hell was wrong with a kid who didn't try to get away in a public place like that? He hated kids. He hated having to try to figure out what was going on in their freaky little heads. He was glad he hadn't had to interact with this particular one at all.

"Jeb?" Edwards interrupted his musings. "The kid has to be getting hungry. We've had him for hours and only gave him water. Foster said to keep him in good shape."

"Is he complaining?"

"No, but . . ." Edwards trailed off, as Jeb attacked.

"Then, shut up. Maybe he's just tired. He's probably sleeping. I'm sure he'll tell you if he's hungry. If he whines, just give him one of those protein bars. And leave me alone. Don't fall back asleep. You're going to take over driving very soon."

Will heard all of this without much surprise. He figured that the two men would take turns with the driving, so that one of them could sleep. He closed his eyes, and willed Mulder and Scully to drive faster than the speed limit. He was almost positive that they would. They had to be frantic. Scully seemed pretty level-headed, but Will knew that she was having a hard time with her feelings about him and about giving him up for adoption. And Mulder wore his feelings on his sleeve, mostly. He had to be feeling guilty about not protecting his newly rediscovered son. It was weird, though, when Will woke up from the latest strange dream, he had the oddest feeling that he had been talking to Mulder. He felt the same sense of sanity he had experienced after he had talked to him on the phone from the library. That feeling was fading fast, though, and was being replaced with an intense feeling of isolation as he was dragged further and further away from the life he had known.

He could only guess at the intentions of these two men, but the latest overheard conversation let him know that they weren't in it alone. There was a boss figure, and there was something specific in store for him. He was more and more reluctant to sleep; the odd dreams were disquieting to him, even though he realized that they were his mind's way of processing the dearth of information that he was painstakingly acquiring. Despite his fatigue, he decided to try to stay awake as long as possible. Besides, what if they took a turn, and he wasn't up to notice. If he managed to get away, how would he let people know where he was?

"Uh, excuse me?" He tried to speak quietly, but his words split the silence of the car like the passage of a cargo jet. He flinched at the sound, sure that Jeb would hit the ceiling.

"What, kid?"

"I am a _little_ hungry. Could I have one of those bars?"

The sound of Edwards rustling around in a plastic bag reached Will's ears. Moments later, two energy bars came flying at him out of the darkness. His martial arts reflexes kicked in and he caught them both in his handcuffed hands. He put one of them in his pocket and ate the other one slowly. When he was about halfway finished with the bar, the car exploded with Jeb's cursing.

"God-damn, son-of-a-bitch, mother . . ."

Edwards sat forward suddenly to look out of the windshield, trying to figure out what had made his partner-in-crime lose his cool. He started to curse in rough unison with Jeb.

"Shit, shit, shit. Jeb, what do we do?"

Will bent his head to look forward out of the front of the SUV. What he saw made him want to start singing aloud. There were three highway patrol cars parked across the road, with a gap between two of them, just wide enough for a semi to inch through. A fourth car was parked off to the side, head-on to the traffic. All of their lights were flashing, and there was a jumbled mass of cars trying to merge into one line. Everyone was inching forward, and some cars were cooperating patiently, while others seemed hell-bent on obstructing the whole procedure refusing to allow others to merge.

The black rig was about twelve cars back, and would need to merge in order to be in the main line of cars. Will could see that Jeb's head was whipping back and forth, trying to see a way out of the predicament.

"Maybe it isn't for us," Edward put forth hopefully.

"Shut up, you stupid loser. Of course it's for us." He paused to think a bit more, and then said, "Okay, this is what we'll do. Put the kid in the cargo area. Cover him with the blanket. It's dark; we'll go through like nothing."

Will was of a mind not to cooperate, when Edwards seized him roughly by the arm. It was very difficult for the giant man to maneuver in the confines of the small space, so he shoved Will towards the back of the vehicle, and told him to move to the back.

"Lay down," Edwards ordered gruffly. "And you know what will happen to Mulder and Scully if you make a peep."

Will nodded and laid on the floor. He felt the smelly blanket come down over him like a death shroud. He tried not to breathe very deeply, and to be still. Every move made a shower of dust fall over his face. He rolled a bit, to get onto his stomach and laid his forehead on his folded arms. It was a little easier to breathe. He could hear the two men talking again, but wasn't encouraged by what he heard.

"Get your gun ready, Edwards."

"Shit, I don't want to shoot a cop, Jeb." But the sound of a clip being checked accompanied his words.

"Then get out now, and don't expect to make it home alive, because I'll track you down myself, you miserable quitter. You signed a contract, stupid, and you signed it in blood." They inched closer to the roadblock.

"What are we gonna do?" Edwards bent forward to look at the flashing lights again. Apparently, he had folded to Jeb's pressure, and wasn't planning on exiting the car anytime soon.

"If they pass us through, we don't do nothing. If they don't, I'll shoot the two on the left side, and you get the two on the right. Then I'll floor it, and we make a run for it. Thank god for budget cuts; at least there's only four of them."

"Shit, Jeb, what about all of these witnesses?"

"The cops are already looking for us. The witnesses won't know what happened. Not one of them will be able to tell a damned thing. People don't pay attention to other people's shit unless it concerns them. The cops will interview them, and get a dozen different descriptions of our vehicle."

"Okay . . ." Edwards didn't sound convinced to Will. "I just though this would be an easy pickup and delivery, that's all."

"Stop whining and get ready. We're almost there."

After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, marked only by the start and stop feel of the SUV, Will heard the windows go down on the two front doors. He heard an unfamiliar voice order the truck to stop, and he heard the voice ask the two men to get out of the vehicle. At that, all hell broke loose.

The sound of a brief volley of shots rang out, the two handguns inside the car sounding loud enough to break Will's eardrums. Two final shots barked out, and then he heard a yell.

"Go, go, go!" screamed Edwards, and the SUV jumped forward. The motion was accompanied by a loud scraping sound, just before the right side of the vehicle jumped up in the air, one tire at a time.

"You ran over him!" yelled Edwards.

"Hopefully, he was already dead," came the calm reply. "Now shut the fuck up and get back." The speed that they were travelling was so obviously faster than what they had travelled before, that Will felt a sudden fear for his life. Jeb's cool voice scared him more now that it had since he woke up. He sounded so... heartless.

Now that they were through the roadblock, Will lifted the blanket off of himself, silently. He could breathe again, but the seriousness of his predicament struck him hard between the eyes. He clamped his eyes shut, feeling the prickle of tears behind his lids. He bit his lip, and imagined himself working his way through his martial arts patterns. He imagined his way through three patterns, before he felt calm overtake him again. He sat up and wiped the moisture of escaped tears off of his face. The silence of the two men seemed more ominous now. He wondered how he would ever survive this ordeal.

XXXXX

The hiss of the speeding tires was suddenly overwhelmed by the ringing of a phone. Scully fished it out of her pocket and handed it off to Mulder.

"Mulder."

"There's been some trouble," Skinner reported without preamble.

"What kind?"

"Three LEO's shot dead at a roadblock, another in critical condition, just this side of Reno."

"Oh, my god!" Mulder whispered in horror.

"What? What is it?" Scully thumped him hard in the shoulder.

Mulder relayed the information to his wife, as Skinner waited impatiently. Scully grabbed the phone, and Mulder grabbed the wheel to keep them on the road.

"Where are they? Did they get away? Are they in custody?" Her questions were like shotgun blasts, and made him bleed guilt.

"Scully, they killed the officers at the roadblock and blew through. We know it was them, because the officers had already radioed the situation in, as soon as they spotted the plate. There's also video from the patrol vehicles. But, we didn't get them. The officer who wasn't killed hasn't regained consciousness."

"Jesus, Skinner, didn't you relay that they were dangerous?"

"Of course I did, Scully. But no one expected this."

Scully took the wheel back as she handed Mulder the phone, none too gently in her anger. He rubbed the contact point gingerly, watching her carefully.

Then he quickly gave Skinner their plate number from the rental agreement. "Make sure you smooth the path for us to blow through the investigation scene. We don't need to be held up being interrogated. And I need for you to call Marilyn for me. Let her know I won't be back for a while, and that we're safe."

"I will. Be careful. Keep me posted." Skinner hung up, and Mulder slowly folded the phone closed.

"Scully, you have to stop blaming Skinner."

"I don't blame him."

"Bullshit."

Scully sighed heavily, and said, "I'm just angry with him still, about how he hid the fact that he was having Will watched, and how he told Will about his mother. I can't seem to let go of it."

"Okay," Mulder told her. He grasped her hand in his. "But it isn't helping to have you and Skinner at each other's throats."

"I'm trying." She felt guilty. "I'll try harder. But he's my son, Mulder." Those few words conveyed all of her fear, and her feelings of impotence, and her intolerable pain.

"Mine, too," he gently reminded her.


	15. Chapter 15

A/N: I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to comment on this story. I appreciate every comment. Thank you for reading.

Chapter 15

California

"Scully, pull over."

"What, again?" She glanced over at him in the darkness. The indirect light from the dash illuminated his face.

"No, but we need to get a plan." Mulder scrubbed his hand over his face, feeling very tired, and very old. To Scully, he sounded defeated.

"We have to get gas, anyway." Scully looked over at him again, and saw the toll that the last couple of days had taken on her partner. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes seemed more pronounced, and his demeanor was altogether droopy. "And food," she added.

"And caffeine."

She took the next exit, and pulled into a gas station. The glaring lights were painful to their eyes, and Scully found herself squinting as she pulled up next to a pump. The horrible colors of the chain screamed out at them from every pump and clashed with everything else in the world. Scully shut off the engine, and sat there for a moment, wondering what it might be like to have to work in such a place. Finally, she sighed and climbed out to deal with the gas. She pulled out her fake credit card as Mulder dragged himself out of the other side of the car and trudged heavily into the mini mart. As soon as she finished the interminable job of filling the tank, she headed in after him.

Scully found him staring vacantly at the hot dog machine. The lights inside the store were even more brilliant than the ones outside. Scully went to the other side of the elaborate island, and filled two large cups with very strong coffee, trying to talk herself out of a headache from the glare. Putting an inordinate amount of sugar into both cups, she capped them and went back to the other side. Mulder was still standing there, staring.

"Those are hot dogs, Mulder." He slowly moved his head around to look at her, and said, "Hmm?"

She shook her head as she handed him the cup and told him to drink. Wandering around the store, she picked out a number of edibles, including several large bags of sunflower seeds, and a map. Getting behind Mulder, she herded him towards the checkout.

"Bathroom, Scully."

The clerk pointed the way, and Mulder wandered off. Scully finished the purchase, and asked the clerk to hold the bag while she visited the facilities as well. She hurried, because somewhere in the back of her mind, she half-expected Mulder, in his exhausted state, to wander out to the car and absently leave her behind. Meeting him as she came out, she breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed their bag and coffees, and dragged Mulder back to the car.

"Sit down, and drink," she ordered her patient, as she handed him the large coffee. She watched as he burned his tongue, cursed, and perked up a bit.

"I'm so tired," he mumbled to her.

"I know. It's from the bits of sleep you keep getting. You never sleep long enough to recharge. It just makes you more tired. But we have to have a plan, like you said. Chasing these guys across the country is stupid."

"It's stupid. But what choice do we have?"

"Mulder, I'm going on record, here. I believe you have some connection to Will."

That statement woke Mulder from his stupor, like no cup of coffee could. "Could you repeat that, Scully?"

"No. I won't. But, since you have that connection, let's use it to our advantage. We need to get ahead of these guys."

"How?"

"We fly. When we get to Mt Shasta, we get on a plane, and head to the next city, get there ahead of them." It seemed such a logical thing to do, to Scully. She felt like she should have thought of it before.

"We don't know where they're going." He looked at her, finally, with some spark of life in his darkened hazel eyes. Scully reached out and stroked his face, then moved the stubborn hank of hair off of his forehead gently. He reached up and pressed her hand into his cheek, closing his eyes.

"We will. You need to go back to sleep. You only seem to connect with Will through dreams. Besides, we're pretty sure, from their original plates, that New Mexico is their destination." She pulled a map out of the bag, and pored over the southwest corner of the country. "I think they'll head towards Reno."

He sat thinking about her words, clinging to her ocean-blue eyes. It made a certain sense. Yes, the dreams made him sick to his stomach. Yes, the information was, in a sense, garbled. But they _had_ been able to glean enough from the weirdness to pinpoint the kidnappers twice. He slowly nodded.

"Okay. Let's go with that."

XXXXX

Will sat on the seat, again, fighting sleep, trying to keep track of where they were. As far as he could tell, about two and a half hours had elapsed since the roadblock incident. He couldn't figure why the police hadn't stopped them yet. They had come through a small town, called Susanville, and had switched over to Route 395. Edwards and Jeb were unusually quiet, even for them. Jeb was sleeping on the bench in front of Will, and Edwards was driving. The last thing that they had discussed was going southeast to Reno, and then down to Vegas, before heading east to New Mexico. Will wondered what awaited him in New Mexico, but they were so determined to get him there, that it certainly couldn't be good.

Will thought about striking up a conversation with the taciturn Edwards, to see what information he could get out of him while Jeb was asleep, but it seemed that he was a bit shaken by the murder of the police officers, so Will left him alone. The last thing Will wanted to do was to rile up a murderer. Lights were few and far between on the highway they were on, but Will could tell that they were almost into desert country. There were trees on the right side of the highway, and gaping darkness on the other. When there were lights, the darkness beyond them swallowed up the light like a black hole. There were no cities in sight from where they were; it was so different from nights in Seattle, which seemed to be perpetually lit by the day-glow lights there. It made him think back to Wyoming, and the dark, dark nights there on the ranch.

Thinking about the ranch made him sad, and made him miss his mother. He wondered what had become of the property there, since there was no one to take care of it. He hoped that someone had taken the cattle and the horses, so that they wouldn't starve. There must be some kind of process in place when everyone on a property died, right?

Will fought sleep in the extended silence, as the road got more boring, and finally the biological need overtook the need to keep track of where they were. His head fell forward a couple of times, jerking him awake, but finally, he slipped sideways and collapsed onto the bench seat. His weird dreams began almost immediately.

_ Will stood alone by the side of the highway, right next to a curiously illuminated highway sign that read '395.' It was otherwise dark, except for a single circle of light, far off to the north. He started stumbling towards the seductive light, tripping over bushes and rocks in the darkness. His balance was hindered due to the handcuffs he wore, so he fell to his knees more than once, tearing his jeans, and cutting his hands on the sharp rocks. He kept moving towards the light, but it never seemed to get any closer. It didn't seem any further away, either, which gave him the curious feeling that he was on a treadmill._

_ Suddenly, out of the darkness, a frantic cow charged. He jumped out of the way, avoiding injury, but another one was right behind the first. The two cows quickly became an unending herd of frantic, lowing cattle, with a horse thrown in now and then. Will was caught in the midst of a stampede, and knew that his only hope of survival was his abnormally quick reflexes. He spent long minutes jumping from one position to another as the cows and horses continued to charge out of the darkness at him. His handcuffs had no effect on his balance, now, but it didn't seem strange to him._

_ Finally, the stampede stopped in a weirdly sudden way. Will stood still, panting, knowing somehow that those were his cattle, from his mother's ranch in Wyoming. He determined that they must have followed him here from the ranch, and that he should find them, so that they could be taken care of. They must be heading for Reno or Vegas, he thought, as he turned away from the circle of light and started after the cows. Reno's to the southeast, he thought, and I have to catch the cows before they get to the city and cause a lot of trouble. _

_ Will started running in the dark, and was suddenly not tripping on anything. His pathway seemed clear and smooth, hard and dark. Looking down, he noticed that he was back on the highway, but that there were no cars. He was running down the middle, along the dashed yellow lines, which were shining as if headlights were picking up the reflective paint._

_ "Hey, wait!" he heard from behind him. Will looked over his shoulder, and saw Mulder chasing after him, waving his arms. The circle of light seemed to have moved, and Mulder was in the middle of it, with the reflective yellow lines painting his face and arms the color of jaundice. Will slowed down, torn between catching his cows, and waiting for Mulder and the circle of light._

_ "Will!" Mulder yelled. "I can hear you."_

_ Will stopped and turned completely around. He yelled back, "What do you mean? Of course, you can hear me! I can hear you, too."_

_ "No, I mean, I can hear you when you dream."_

_ "You can hear my dream?" Will asked his father. "Can I hear your dreams?"_

_ "Well," Mulder said to his son, "you're talking to me, and I'm dreaming, right? So you must be able to hear my dreams, too."_

_ "Do we have to dream at the same time?" Will wondered aloud._

_ "I think so, but I'm new at this, and you need to catch your cows, before they get to Reno, and stampede through the streets," Mulder informed him gravely. _

_ "But they might be heading to Vegas," said Will, as Mulder started to shrink down to a fraction of his real size, right before Will's eyes._

_ "Wait! HELP MEEEEEEEE!" Will screamed, as Mulder shrank and disappeared with an audible pop._

"HELP MEEEEEEEE!" screamed Mulder, as he suddenly came awake in the passenger seat of the car. Scully swerved as his scream rent the air in the rental car.

"Jesus, Mulder! This is getting old!" She didn't wait for his request this time; she immediately steered off onto the shoulder.

Panting, Mulder took note of the fact that he was awake, that he had had another dream, and that he only felt slightly nauseous this time. There was no pain in his stomach, nor was there any biological imperative to vomit.

"What did you dream, Mulder?" Scully was wild to hear the latest, and leaned towards him, almost unable to keep herself from grabbing her husband and shaking the story out of him.

"Scully! I think I talked to him in our dream! We were discussing the fact that I could see his dreams, and that we had to be dreaming at the same time."

"You can talk to him? He can hear you? What did he say? Where is he?"

Scully peppered him with questions, grasping his upper arm none too gently in her frenzied need for information.

Mulder laid one of his hands over both of hers, which were squeezing his bicep uncomfortably, and she calmed. He tried to remember the dream, as it floated away from him, like cobwebs in a wind.

"He was chasing cows down highway 395 towards Reno, worried that they would stampede through the city. He said they might be heading to Vegas." His brows came together and wrinkled his forehead, as he tried to grasp the strands of the dream. Not much more of the dream seemed important.

"What?" asked Scully. "Cows?"

"I don't know what that was all about," admitted Mulder, "but he seemed pretty frantic about it." He looked out of the window.

"We need to get to an airport," Scully said. "Get the map out."

As Mulder rummaged in the glove compartment, Scully pulled back out into the light traffic, glad that the dreams weren't making Mulder so sick anymore. Mulder perused the map, and found the nearest airport. He gave her directions, and she kept driving silently, but Mulder could hear her anxiety as easily as if she had expressed it aloud.

"That's a pretty small airport, " Scully commented. "Probably no flights this late."

"Probably not. Let me see what I can do."

Mulder got Skinner on the phone, again. Without prelude, he started talking.

"We need a flight out of the Dunsmuir Municipal Airport. We're about twenty minutes out. What can you put together?"

"It's five in the morning here, in case you wanted to know."

"Damn, Skinner, you're amazing, a real early-riser!"

"Mulder, if I were within striking distance…"

"I know. You can have your hug when this is all over. Can you get us a flight? Dunsmuir."

"I'll see what I can do." Mulder hung up on Skinner, so he could call in favors from whomever he could.

It took Skinner fifteen minutes to call back. Scully had them to the outskirts of Mt. Shasta by the time the phone rang. Mulder snatched up the phone from the seat where he had laid it, and answered.

"Yeah. What've you got?"

"Not exactly an airplane."

"What, then?"

"There will be a helicopter waiting for you. They apparently keep one ready for rescues. They can fly you to Reno. That's the best I can do at this hour." Skinner waited for Mulder's response.

"Crap. What's the airspeed of a helicopter?"

"He said he can get you there in under an hour."

Mulder was silent, holding the phone to his ear and trying to figure out from the map just how far it was to Reno, and where the kidnappers were likely to be.

"Okay, we'll take it. It might work. But at least we'll be at a real airport and can get a flight to Vegas or New Mexico from there. Thanks." Mulder wrote down information about who he was looking for, and hung up.

"Two miles," Scully said.

Mulder took off his seatbelt and started rounding up the requisite gear. He looked around the back seat, and decided the two gear bags held just about everything they needed. He tucked random things into the pockets, and had just finished when Scully signaled to turn into the tiny airport. Mulder directed her towards the helipad, and she parked by the little metal building. A helicopter was sitting out in front of the building, rotors spinning.

The two of them grabbed the bags, and ran towards the helicopter, approaching from the front. Pausing, they waited until they had a thumbs-up from the pilot, before making the last twenty feet. The pilot hopped out and stowed their bags in the small compartment behind the passenger area. Mulder climbed into the front seat, after helping Scully shut the door on the back seat. The helicopter was a 4-seater, and looked like a soap bubble with an extremely powerful engine mounted on top of it. It seemed to Scully a pretty silly way to travel.

Everyone put on a set of headphones, and the pilot spoke to them, verifying their destination. He informed them that the FBI was picking up the tab for the flight, after Mulder asked how much the trip was going to cost them.

"Skinner's going to be in a bit of hot water, when the auditor gets a hold of that one!" Mulder remarked. He fastened his seat harness, and they were airborne within five minutes of parking.

"What kind of speed do you want?" asked the pilot.

Scully took that one, saying, "What's the top speed?"

"Roger that, ma'am," the pilot laughed, calling in his flight information to the tower, and clearing the airport's airspace before putting the pedal down, so to speak.

The flight was uneventful and boring, since the countryside was so dark. They couldn't see anything, and might as well have been flying over an ocean. They jumped out of the helicopter at the Reno airport exactly 50 minutes after they had climbed in. The pilot explained how to get to the main terminal, and they shook his hand, telling him thanks.

In obvious contrast to the Dunsmuir airport, which had been black and empty, Reno was hopping and lit up like a circus.

Mulder looked at Scully as they made their way to the main terminal, and told her, "I think we should go ahead to Vegas."

"Why?"

"A hunch."

If Scully had learned nothing else from her years with Mulder, she had definitely learned to trust his hunches. Still, she hesitated. She took so long to reply to him, that he bumped her shoulder with his elbow.

"What do you think?"

Scully stopped, then, and peered up at her husband. "I'm hesitating, because we seem so close here. They must be coming into Reno fairly soon."

"Yeah." He thought it through for a moment. "But what if we miss them, and at the same time, miss the only flight to Vegas?"

"Okay, then, Mulder. We'll go to Vegas. If you're wrong, I'm going to whack you over the head with your hunch."

"Oh, boy, beatings."


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Reno

"I changed my mind," ventured Mulder, a line of apprehension faintly etched down the middle of his forehead.

"Changed your mind?" Scully asked incredulously. "About what?"

"Okay, so hear me out, Scully." He reached over and grasped her hand, pulling slightly so that she was facing him fully. Distracted by her clear gaze, he reached up to move a strand of fiery hair back from her face. He smiled at her.

"Mulder." Her scowl re-focused him, and her warning was not really necessary.

"Huh? Yeah, so I'm thinking that we should go directly to New Mexico, check out that address, and see if we can catch whoever's behind this. It really seems like it will be hit or miss, trying to catch them on the road. And I really, really don't want to endanger any more LEO's. We need to work at this in a smart way, not in a knee-jerk way." He rubbed her hand with his thumb while she processed this speech.

"Well . . . what's the nearest airport to Gallup?" she asked reluctantly.

"Albuquerque. Two hours east. We could fly in there and rent a car to drive the rest of the way."

"We'd get there far earlier than them, if the flight's available." She absently petted his hand, like it was a little dog.

"We should check on that."

"Let's check on it, while I chew on the idea." She stood and pulled him up.

"Scully…" His hold on her hand kept her from moving away.

"Mulder?"

"How are you holding up? Really, I mean?" He knew that if she said she was 'fine,' he'd have to probe some more to get to the real feelings.

She leaned into his broad, strong chest and put her ear against his heart. The powerful beat warmed her, gave her strength and refocused her. She closed her eyes and her arms went around his narrow waist. She sighed and squeezed him hard to reassure him that she was holding up pretty well.

"I'm good, Mulder, as long as we keep working together. I couldn't do this by myself. You know that, right?"

"Same here, Scully. So, the gist of this is that you'd better do what I say, right?"

"Bully."

"What happened to supporting your spouse?" She released him and made a face at him.

The two of them wandered arm in arm through the noisy airport, winding through the gambling areas, where frenzied people pulled the arms on the slot machines. Some were groaning; some were boisterously happy. They finally stood before a ticket agent, who found a flight to Albuquerque that departed in half an hour. After looking at Scully for confirmation of the plan, Mulder bought tickets.

Both of them passed out for the four hour flight, once they were settled on the plane. Mulder didn't dream this time, and actually felt refreshed when he woke. They disembarked in the pale light of early morning in Albuquerque and rented a car. Two hours later found them rolling into Gallup.

It was a dusty little town, still completely asleep at this hour, and surrounded by the most spectacular scenery. The early morning sun exaggerated the reddish tones of the cliffs and hills around the town. The colors of the town and its surroundings looked as if they had been subjected to some mysterious source of heat and had melted together into a gooey, swirling mass. After rubber-necking for the first twenty minutes in town, Scully reached up to massage her neck.

"This is so amazing, Mulder."

"It reminds me of the time we vacationed with CGB Spender and almost got blown up. I'm all a-shiver inside."

"Shut up, Mulder."

Smiling at her most-often repeated phrase, he looked around for a place to get a map of the town, or directions. Finally, he settled on a garishly lighted gas station and mini mart that looked painfully out of place in the general rustic theme of the town. He parked by the pumps and told Scully he'd be back in a minute. While he went to look for a map, she pumped gas into the rental. Moments later, they were back on the road, directions in hand. The place they were looking for was nearly at the end of Deer Ridge Road, a very rural road, from the look of the map. The clerk had looked pretty suspicious when Mulder had asked about the address he'd gotten from Skinner; apparently, not too many people lived out there.

The road was paved for a bit, and then turned to a dusty reddish gravel. Mulder started wondering where the jack was in the rental car, because the gravel itself seemed so large and sharp. He winced every time a rock bounced up against the bottom of the car, sure that the gas tank was in imminent danger of being punctured.

"Give me a city life, any day, Scully. I do believe my shoes are going to get dirty."

Her only response was to roll her eyes at him, and to keep looking all around. Brush was sparse here, and didn't have much color. The ever-present dust coated everything, muting the green of the vegetation, as well as the road signs.

"There!" Scully pointed at an almost indiscernible handmade sign stabbed drunkenly into a pile of rocks that acted as an anchor. Scrawled on the sign in spray-paint were the digits 465. "465 Deer Ridge Road, right?"

"That's it, alright," Mulder agreed. He kept driving, looking for a place to pull off and park. The best place would allow them to conceal their car a bit, although he was pretty sure that traffic along here probably rivaled car traffic in the Sahara. About a half-mile further on, he pulled off and drove behind a 7-foot high bush that looked like it was either dead, or well on its way to becoming a monster tumbleweed.

It was hot when they climbed out of the car, but not terribly so. It seemed like every drop of moisture had been pulled out of the air already, so Scully rummaged in the trunk for her backpack and stowed several water bottles in it, along with a few protein bars and several clips of ammo for their guns. Slinging the pack over her shoulders, she then pulled the little Glock out of the ankle holster and checked the clip. She replaced the gun and checked the one in the small of her back. She felt marginally safer knowing that both clips were full and ready to go. Mulder followed her lead, and then met her eyes.

"We need a plan, Mulder. What are we doing here?" She slammed the trunk of the car, and concentrated on reading his face.

"Okay, our mission is to try and find someone home, beat the shit out of him, and collect whatever information he has regarding the kidnapping of our son."

"Can we try a less violent tactic first? I just had my nails done."

"God, all you girls want to do is discuss things to death. Need I remind you that you are in possession of roughly twice as many guns as I am?"

"Yeah, but the ammo is so expensive. If we can scare the crap out of whoever we find, without wasting such an expensive commodity, it would be better. And don't call me a girl."

"Agreed. So, we sneak in around the back, do a bit of spying, and then enter the premises if necessary."

They crossed the busy road in between the swirling dust clouds, and started cross-country in the general direction of the property they had passed. Despite the barrenness of the landscape, the walking was a bit challenging, due to the uneven rocks. They both wore sneakers, and their ankles became sore from constant twisting and turning as they made their way along. The brush was surprisingly thick, and mostly grew over their heads. It made them feel a bit safer, knowing that they were mostly concealed.

"Uh, Scully. . ." Mulder stopped abruptly in front of her.

"Yes, Mulder?"

"What kinds of animals live around here?"

"I don't know, for sure. But it seems like, in a brush-land biome, you'd see coyotes, some kinds of rodents, rattlesnakes. . ." She came up by his side.

"Okay. Stop. That's what I was afraid of." He pointed nervously at a snake waiting patiently in their path.

"Oh, for God's sake, Mulder, that isn't a rattler. Look at its head. Rattlers have arrowhead shaped heads. That looks like a bull snake. They bite, but aren't poisonous. They eat rats and stuff."

"How the hell do you know all that?"

"Two brothers. Stationed everywhere. Just stuff I learned as a kid."

"I didn't learn that as a kid."

"_You_ were a city kid." She walked around him, giving the snake some room.

"You don't have to make it sound like a disability, you know."

"Well, out here, it is. Let me go first. I'll protect you."

Mulder sighed, and followed. The only other wildlife they surprised was a flock of small birds, who had taken up residence in a bush, and practically made him pee himself when they exploded out of it.

"Are we there, yet?"

"Wait," Scully whispered, ducking behind another bush. "Look, there it is."

"I think it's condemned."

"If it isn't, it should be. Let's work our way around the back."

Scully led the way, carefully keeping at least one bush between them and the house as she did so. As they picked their way along, Mulder's brain was split between observing the house for motion and observing the ground for snakes. His forehead was feeling a bit clammy, after the snake discovery. So far, the house was looking abandoned. There was no car in front of it, although he spied a dirt bike leaning against a shed. It was well-covered by the red dust, though, and didn't look to be a viable mode of transportation. The only thing that made them think that the house was being used was a small flock of dirt-colored chickens, which scratched around in the dirt for seeds and bugs.

As they rounded the house, they saw that the back wall had a door set into it, with a small set of stairs leading to it. The two of them hunkered down behind a bush to wait a bit, and to watch the house for any sign of occupation.

They squatted there for half an hour, before deciding that there probably wasn't anyone home. The sun was well up in the sky now, and the day was heating up. The colors of the rocks in the hills took on yet another fantastic hue. Scully took a moment to drag a bottle of water out of her pack, and swig down half of it. She offered it to Mulder and watched him finish it off in a couple of swallows.

"More?" she whispered.

"I'm good. Ready?" He watched her put the bottle back into her pack. She took an extra clip out for her main gun, and offered one to Mulder, before stowing the pack behind the bush.

"Ready."

Gingerly, and with much suspicion, they came out from the bush and silently made their way towards the door. Scully reached the stairs first, and positioned herself to the side of the sand-scoured door, holding her gun at the ready. Mulder knocked.

All of a sudden, the door flew outwards as a large mutt threw itself at it, snarling and growling. The dog got Mulder's left arm in its gaping, tooth-lined maw, and proceeded to knock him off-balance enough that he backpedaled down the stairs. He only just managed to keep from falling over with the dog's weight. Scully, who had been standing frozen and wide-eyed with astonishment, ran at the two, who were locked in mortal combat. The dog's eyes were wildly insane, and slobber flew left and right from the sides of its mouth, as it whipped its head back and forth in a frenzy. Mulder tried to get it to release him, by whacking it on the head with his gun, but the frenzy ruled and the dog clamped down harder.

"Stay back, Scully," Mulder yelled. He remembered suddenly what his gun could do and struggled to find a place to shoot the berserk animal without hurting himself or Scully. He finally managed to position his gun against the side of the dog's chest and put a bullet through it. The crazed mongrel fell limp, and the weight of the dog falling pulled Mulder to his knees. Adrenaline had him shaking, now.

"I can't . . . I can't get it off," he said frantically, pulling at the bloody locked jaw. He could see that the teeth were sunken into his arm all the way to the gums, and his blood was pouring freely down to the red dirt. He closed his eyes against the image.

"Hold still, Mulder." Scully succeeded in pulling the dog's jaws open on her third try, and released Mulder, who sat fully on his ass in the dirt, now. A groan escaped his throat, as he put his head down to combat the light-headedness that was threatening his consciousness.

"Shit, shit, shit."

"Shhh. Calm down; it will pass. You need to help me. I can't carry you, Mulder, you're too big. Stay with me." She ripped the tail off of his shirt and wrapped it tightly around the wounds, partly to cover it so that he would stop looking, and partly to control the bleeding, which didn't look all that bad.

"Guess no one's home." He looked at his wife, and put on his brave face.

"Yeah, I guess they would have something to say about your treatment of their pet."

"Pet? That's no pet. I'm pretty sure it's a cloned saber-toothed tiger."

"Ready to get up? We should check the house. Or you could wait by the bush while I do it." Scully brushed his hair back off of his forehead, and looked into his eyes, giving solace as well as seeking confirmation that he wasn't about to pass out.

"Like I'd ever live _that_ down. Let's go." Mulder climbed shakily to his feet, and followed her up the rickety stairs again.

"Why do you suppose the dog didn't bark?"

"Dunno, Scully, maybe he was trained not to. Pretty weird, though."

Their second attempt at entry was more successful. The door was still standing open, and the inside seemed cooler than the outside. The décor of the first room seemed typical, if not boring. But the rest of what they found in the house made them both shiver with fear.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Three nondescript sedans of indeterminate color, lightly coated in red dust, were parked outside of the small house at the coolly odd angles preferred by FBI agents in a hurry. Everything was perfectly still, as if it occupied a painting of the southwest in a souvenir shop. It was unbearably hot now, with not a discernible drop of moisture in the surrounding three states, as far as Mulder could tell. He was pretty sure the bushes were close to spontaneously exploding, so he was keeping a close eye on them through the wraparound sunglasses he had dug out of his suitcase. When he had sat down on the steps, there had been a shadow to hunker in, not that it made much difference. He had moved three times anyway, following it as it crept across the bottom stair. It had finally crawled off the stair and onto the sandy clay. The only thing that kept Mulder from following it further were the randomly deposited dog turds that looked as if they might spell out a word if he took another one of the doctor's pain killers and hovered high enough above the piles.

He stared at the dark blood stain where the dog had fallen after he had shot it and Scully had managed to pry its teeth out of his torn flesh. There were other signs of the scuffle visible in the sandy clay yard. Clumps of unwillingly sacrificed vegetation lay withering in the sun, roots exposed like white lies. Scuff marks from his and Scully's shoes had left intricate patterns in the red dust, hieroglyphs that could almost be deciphered. Forensics had taken the dog away to test it for rabies, and he had his fingers crossed for an outcome in his favor. The FBI had requested an expedited test, but that might slow them down, depending on the lab's relationship with law enforcement around here.

The door opened and a slight figure started down the stairs, interrupting his drug-induced rumination. Mulder shielded his eyes and looked back over his shoulder at his wife. He could barely see her outline with the sun blinding him, so he waited for her to come all the way down.

"Your arm is supposed to be in a sling, Mulder."

"Too hot."

"You never do what your doctor tells you to do."

"I have this theory about that."

"I thought you might." She put her hand on his forehead.

"How the hell are you going to tell anything like that, Scully?" he asked her peevishly, shoving her hand aside. "It's two hundred degrees out here."

"It's ninety-two, you wimp. Why don't you go inside? It's a bit cooler."

"I'm waiting for Skinner. I can't get my mind around that stuff. I don't think…" he trailed off, glancing at her anxiously, then back at his feet.

"What, Mulder? You don't think what?" Perversely, she pushed him.

"I don't think they're bringing Will here." Perversely, he told himself it was the heat that made him hurt her back.

"I know." She said the words very softly, like it would make them less true.

"You know?"

"Yeah." She studied her fingers as she twisted the plain gold band around and around the ring finger of her left hand. There was a new scratch on the band, she noticed, and she ran the short nail of her thumb along it. "There's something you should see inside."

"Scully, you shouldn't be in there." He took her hand to make up for hurting her, and noticed it was shaking almost imperceptibly. He felt very small and very mean. "Hell, I shouldn't be in there. No one should see any of that sick stuff."

"We have to, if we have any chance of saving Will's life." She raised the one weapon she had that would always slay him, the tear-dampened jewel-bright ocean-colored eyes that had liberated him, worshiped him, rescued him, confided in him, committed to him, inspired him, encouraged him, and set him on fire. Now, they asked him to go inside this house and imagine again, together with her, the inconceivable end of their son, at the hands of a group of homicidal animals more malevolent than any they had ever encountered. His head was already shaking.

"Please just tell me," he implored. "Just tell me what you found."

"No. I need you. I need the way you think. Please, Mulder." She clung to his hand, and he could feel her need in her trembling hand. She wasn't just speaking the words. He bowed his head and found that he had been wrong. There was moisture here, in the tears that wet his face. He stood and pulled her with him. They turned, and together, they entered the house.

Holding hands, they walked across the dingy tan linoleum in the shabby kitchen. They didn't notice that two of the doors on the cheap kitchen cabinets were hanging askew, although they had noticed them when they went through the first time. They didn't see that the window was so fly-specked that very little light shone through. They only perceived the warmth of the connection between their two hands, and they clung to that for the moment, because it gave them the strength to go to the next room.

They entered the living room, which held a recliner and an old red couch, reminiscent of a broken-down train seat, narrow and not much plush in the first place, now completely bare. Two rickety tables held piles of papers, organized roughly into folders. Mulder's eyes fixated on these piles. Two agents sat on folding chairs, and were sorting through the piles. They looked up at the pair, and then at each other.

"Time for a break, Roy?"

"Yup."

They walked out past Mulder and Scully, but they could have been aliens, for all the notice the pair took of them. They pulled the chairs closer together and sat down as one. Scully took a long breath in, and then released it, closing her eyes briefly, and then let go of Mulder's hand. She looked at him.

"Ready?"

"No."

"Me, neither."

"So, this is what I found." She pulled a folder towards them, and slowly opened it. Inside, on top, was a photo of a beautiful jungle paradise, with several people posed in front of a cave, standing in ankle deep water. If Mulder didn't have a vague idea of what was coming, he would have enjoyed the photo album. It spoke of a group of young people hiking through an exotic locale, enjoying each other's company and enjoying nature. Scully moved the first photo aside. Behind it was another one of the same people, deeper in the cave. The lighting was subdued, provided by the mouth of the cave and by a flash. The water was up to the hips of the people. Another person was in this group, one who wasn't in the other group. She seemed to be young, perhaps early twenties, and appeared to be drunk or drugged, because she was being held up by two of the others, and her hands were tied together in front of her, and she wore a life jacket, the type with the pillow behind the head. The other expedition members were now wearing hard hats with headlamps.

As Scully flipped through the photos, Mulder felt his gut clench. The story of the young woman became clearer as the journey through the cave was documented. Ancient human remains and ancient pottery were photographed alongside the woman, but she showed no emotion, speaking to the level of dissociation that she must have been experiencing. The deeper the group traveled into the cave, the darker it became, figuratively and literally, until they reached a chamber that seemed immense, although it was impossible to tell from the photos just how large it was. The photo showed the swimmers as bright specks in the middle, and then again climbing out on a cliff on the far side. The photos became close-up again, as well as suddenly grisly. The face of the cliff was discolored by the brown of old blood. It had a very small space upon which to stand, before soaring straight upwards again. The group had placed the woman on her knees in the center of this space, kneeling over a stone. Her eyes were already dead.

"ENOUGH." Mulder closed the folder, leaving his big hand on top of it, almost protectively. "I don't see how this helps us. We already knew that these people were into human sacrifice. What does this tell us, Scully?" He was breathing fast. Both had seen worse. But these people had their son.

She pushed his hand aside and reached into the folder to grab the first photo of the cave, but he grasped her wrist to stop her, almost hurting her.

"Mulder, please," she whispered. "Let me show you." He released her, eyes anguished. She pulled the photo out and turned it over. Written on the back were the words, "Actun Tunichil Muknal."

"What does it mean?" he asked her, glad to have something to focus on.

"I think it's a place." She watched his eyes take on the feral quality they got when he found a clue of significance.

"Is it mentioned in any of this other junk?"

"A lot of it, Mulder. And there's more."

"What?" He reached out and started swiping papers left and right, eyes darting back and forth, as his eidetic memory took pictures of things that might be important.

"It's Mayan."

Mulder froze, arm outstretched in the middle of a swipe. A paper covered in spidery handwriting fluttered to the floor unnoticed. Then he stood abruptly and stared down at her, holding her by the shoulders but not seeing her, mind processing the possibilities at the speed of light. He turned suddenly and went into the kitchen, demanding to use someone's smart phone. Obtaining one, he went back into the living room, sat down, and accessed the Internet. He looked up the term, with Scully looking over his shoulder.

"Belize!" They both exclaimed the word together.

"Shit! How are they going to get him out of the country, Mulder? They don't even have his passport."

"Scully, how many years were you in the FBI? I'd think you would know down to the inch just how much unsecured coastline we have in this country."

"You're the one with the encyclopedic knowledge of useless facts."

"If it's useful once in a lifetime, it isn't useless. I think it's in the range of 5.6 billion inches, but that's including all of the island coasts, so the figure isn't necessarily representative."

"Mulder?"

"What?"

"Shut up." She softened the words by leaning down and kissing his full lips gently. It did the trick, as usual; he shut up, and she got the first faint smile from him since early morning.

"We should fly to Belize," she told him. "If they're going to this cave, we need to get there first. They can't fly. Or, at least, they can't fly commercial."

"Aren't we under arrest?"

"What for?"

"Breaking and entering? Murdering a canine? Infecting a guard dog with my blood?"

"Skinner said not. He smoothed it over, said we were part of some top secret investigation."

"He's good. But can he get us a flight to Belize?"

X X X X X

"You want me to do what?" Skinner asked, eyes jumping from Mulder's earnest face to Scully's.

"We need you to get us a flight to Belize City, Belize, and then a charter flight to San Ignacio. Tonight." Scully let her eyes bore into Skinner's, knowing that he had a hard time when she did that. He looked at them like they had asked him to drag the president by his heels down the length of the Pacific Coast Highway.

"I … I'll have to check into that." He turned away.

"Sir?"

He turned back to her. "Yeah, Scully?"

"This is really important. It may be the only chance we have to get to Will before they kill him. These guys are apparently deadly serious."

Skinner looked at her for a moment. "I know they are. I'll do it."

"Thank you."

Two hours later, Mulder and Scully were aboard a small jet, well into a flight bound for Belize, wondering what Skinner had promised Satan to put them where they were. He had actually managed to put them on a private charter, shortly after the tests on the attack dog had come back negative for rabies, and it was flying straight into San Ignacio. Scully was zonked out, reclined as far as possible and curled into a child-sized ball, drooling lightly on her pillow. Mulder had his wide, comfortable, leather seat leaned as far back as it would go, too, which was pretty far, on this first-class jet, but the images from the photos kept flashing onto the imaginary screen of his eidetic memory. He wished for some Jedi mind trick to be able to clear them enough to be able to sleep, knowing he would be tired later when he needed to be alert. Even an extra dose of pain medication hadn't helped to knock him out.

He laid his head back, laid one arm across his forehead, and tried an old technique, thinking of his toes, relaxing just them, and then his feet, working upwards, one body part at a time.

_Soon enough, he was thinking of his fingers. One finger at a time, he thought, relax, relax. _

_ My fingers ARE relaxed, Mulder, but I need help!_

_ Mulder opened his eyes and the reddish-black of the inside of his eyelids went away. Will floated in front of him, with a sort of tie-dyed background beyond him. His expression was one of fear; his face was pale with dark circles under his eyes, his hair was lank and unwashed, and his hands were cuffed in front of him._

_ "Where are you, Will?"_

_ "I need help, Mulder! I don't know where I am!"_

_ "We're trying to find you, Will. We're going to find you!"_

_ "Can you hear me, Mulder? Please, I'm so tired." Tears started flowing down Will's face, leaving shiny tracks behind and breaking Mulder's heart._

_ "I can hear you, Will! Keep talking!"_

_ As Mulder watched helplessly, Will started moving straight away from him, shrinking as he moved away._

_ "Will! Come back!"_

_ "Mulder, please, I need help!"_

"Oh, my God!" Mulder lurched forward and held his face in his hands, unable to contain the first broken sob that seemed to originate in the vicinity of his crushed heart. A heart crushed by the dream plea from a pre-teen boy he hadn't known for more than a few days, he thought, as he just let the tears flow between his fingers. His hunched shoulders jerked painfully with his sobs, until a small hand landed on one of them soothingly and began a gentle, healing rhythm. The fleeting thought crossed his mind that he should feel some shame that she was witnessing his complete breakdown, but didn't. Instead, he turned completely into her, rested his exhausted head on her shoulder and just let her hold him.

After a long while, he whispered, "I had another dream."

"I guessed."

"He was pleading for help."

"Jesus, Mulder…"

"He couldn't tell me where he was."

"But we're pretty sure where they _will_ go."

"What if…"

"Stop."

"But…"

"MULDER." She pushed his head up and gripped his eyes, almost brown in their intensity. "It was a dream."

"No, Scully! It was a vision. Like the others. True, to the last detail."

"What about the frogs?" Her attempt to lighten his mood fell flat. How come it always worked for him? "Okay, I'll give you this one, Mulder. It's a vision. So, what did you see?"

"He couldn't say where he was." He still clung to her eyes.

"Was he alive?" She watched the brown lighten a bit to a muddy-river-on-a-sunny-day color, and was encouraged.

"Yeah." He went on to describe the vision in detail, clinging to the strength garnered from her eyes.

"So, he was alive, didn't know where he was, and he was scared." Scully fell back on her clinical detachment, to get Mulder back on track, because they couldn't both fall apart at the same time. But she knew, that if she had had that vision, she would be the one sitting here in hysterics while Mulder stroked her back and calmed her down. She concentrated on keeping her breathing even and on keeping the pictures in Mulder's vision from reaching her mind's eye.

He finally looked down. "Doesn't sound so dire, when you say it like that."

"Mulder, I'm really going to need you on the ground. You have to get some sleep."

"What if I dream again?"

"I'm right here. We'll deal with it."

"Can I hold your hand?"

"Always."


	18. Chapter 18

A/N: Sorry for the delay in updating. I've been off the grid.

Chapter 18

_"The date is set, Mulder."_

_ Mulder looked at the boy, who was speaking to him in a dead man's voice,_

_Deep Throat's distinctive, cigarette-roughened growl. Will's hands were still cuffed in front of him, and the tie-dye behind him was coalescing into person-shaped beings, dead people, the souls of those who had passed, who slowly stepped forward to stand around the boy. There were too many to count, but he felt like he could identify every face._

_ "The date is set, Mulder." It was a woman's voice, now, Melissa Scully's ethereal mystic's voice. The boy cycled through voice after voice, until Mulder felt dizzy with the effort to identify the owner of the voice. He finally heard the words, he finally heard the meaning of the words, after repetition after repetition fell upon his ears._

_ "The date is set." The words had been written on the holographic display at Mount Weather, referring to the date for the mobilization of alien forces, to the date that the human race would become slaves to the more advanced alien race that would return to the Earth. _

_ "The date is set."_

_ "Will!" He tried to speak to the child, who was speaking in his mother's voice._

_ "Fox. Fox, my son."_

_ Mulder hesitated, staring at the boy, feeling the weirdness of the words coming from his own son's mouth, and then he closed his eyes, listening for his mother's voice._

_ "After all you've seen, after all you've been through," her voice came gently to him through the boy's mouth, "why is it so hard for you to believe?"_

_ "Mom. . ." Mulder groaned and opened his eyes, and his mother's voice faded from his ears, to be replaced by one entirely different, one not so welcome._

_ "The date is set." Alex Krycek's voice issued eerily from the child's mouth._

_ Then, without taking a breath, Will suddenly spoke in his own voice:_

"_The dead are not lost to us. The date is set, and we need every one. The dead are not lost to us."_

"Uhn-" Mulder sat forward as he woke again. He gripped Scully's hand, still within his own, so hard that she winced, but she didn't withdraw from the pain. She reached over with her other hand and covered his hand with a gentle touch, soothing him, whispering his name.

"Mulder, Mulder, I'm here."

"Yeah." He sat there, breathing deeply, running the dream through the gates of his conscious mind with his eyes closed to keep out extraneous input.

"Yeah."

Scully sat quietly holding his hand, letting him come out of the dream and process the information internally, not terribly concerned when he began rocking back and forth slightly in his seat with his eyes closed.

"The date is set."

Scully didn't answer; it seemed to be something from his dream, even as it seemed something familiar from some x-file of the past. She waited.

"The date is set. The dead are not lost to us. Scully."

"Hmm?"

Mulder stopped rocking and opened his eyes. He looked directly at her, clear-eyed and lucid, not at all distraught, as he had been from the last dream.

"This was an entirely different kind of dream, Scully."

"Vision."

"Smart ass. Also, not helpful."

"Sorry. You were saying?"

"You aren't. Anyway, he was before me, almost exactly as he was in the last one. But, instead of begging for help, he was speaking in the voice of one dead person after another, and those people were surrounding him, and behind him, for as far as you could see. They were countless. I knew some of them, but most of them, I didn't recognize. He spoke in Deep Throat's voice, in Melissa's voice, in Samantha's voice, in my mother's voice, in my father's voice, in X's voice, in Krycek's voice, shit, that was creepy, in your father's voice. And all of those people were there with him. They kept saying the same thing over and over: The date is set. What is today, Scully?"

"No clue. Sometime the first week of November, I think."

"Too early… It's supposed to happen December 22."

"Maybe something happens before then that will decide whether something happens on _that_ date, like a NOT gate.

"Stop talking like a geek, Scully. Make sense, so I understand."

"Okay. If something significant happens before December 22, 2012, then that date becomes insignificant, and nothing happens. If something significant does NOT happen before then, then the mobilization forces you read about happen on that date. It's like a fork in the road, or a decision that leads to parallel universes, where only one of them ends up existing."

"Still geek-speak, Scully. But I get it."

"Are we there, yet?"

"She's touching me."

"I have to go to the bathroom."

"You are the worst traveler, ever."

"I think you broke my hand. I have years of physical therapy ahead of me."

"At least I got a couple of hours of sleep. Thank you."

X X X X X

Whatever Skinner did, he did well, and it spilled over into ground transport. It was waiting for them at the airport, and when they cleared customs, they were immediately on the road. The transition from city to rain forest happened with a abruptness only possible in a third world country. The jungle closed in around them, and the isolation was instantly complete. Their driver, a garrulous fellow missing a large number of teeth, spoke little English. This didn't stop him from releasing a non-stop stream of Spanish at them, between sucking noisily on a large chunk of sugar cane and trying to correct Mulder's pathetic attempts at pidgin Spanish. At least it was marginally amusing, and kept their minds off of their grisly mission. Mulder bore the brunt of the conversation, having scored the front seat, and Scully got to keep company with the driver's pet sloth, who occupied the left-hand seat in the back, and spent most of the time sleeping. This didn't disappoint Scully, since the one time that it opened its eyes sort-of creeped her out.

The road was unbearably bumpy, if one could call it a road. It was more of a set of parallel trails, and the jeep that they rode in had no top or windows, so the overhanging vegetation kept climbing right on in with them, whipping their faces painfully as they made their way down the track. Their passage irritated all manner of wildlife, stirring noisy birds, which rebuked them by screeching as they flew away in panic, rousing various species of primates, whose ear-splitting yelps startled even each other, and galvanizing hosts of insects to arms. The heat was intense, more so than in New Mexico, due to the near 100% humidity level.

Sweating was pointless, because the moisture couldn't evaporate from the skin and carry the heat away, but try and convince your body of that, thought Scully. It just added to the discomfort. If only you could change an involuntary function to a voluntary one at will, she thought, as she mopped another liter of sweat off of her neck with an already soaked bandana. Mulder, she noticed, had gone quiet for the last five minutes, and had been holding his head in his hands.

Too soon, the driver stopped and indicated that he could no longer continue. Mulder and Scully got out, checked their packs for supplies and water, and slung them over their shoulders. The driver indicated, using a sign language of sorts that involve a lot of semi-dangerous arm-waving, that they could use their satellite phone to call when they needed to come out of the jungle. Pointing out a rudimentary trail, he said, "Actun Tunichil Muknal." Then, after moving his sloth back up to the front seat, he waved cheerfully and disappeared back into the jungle. The giant fronds closed over the road like a stage curtain, and it was as if no one had ever been there. The grinding of the jeep gears faded swiftly, swallowed by the vegetation, and the two Americans felt very alone.

After the driver stopped talking, Scully felt like she had experienced a middle-grade hurricane, and was now in the silent aftermath. She stood momentarily panting, which she decided was a mostly psychological reaction, and absorbed the peace of the singing birds, screeching monkeys, and myriad insect noises, before turning to Mulder, anxious to find out why he was so quiet and withdrawn.

His face was now white. She followed his gaze, and hers fell upon the gray land rover parked back in the bushes.

"They're already here," he whispered hoarsely, standing perfectly still, as insects of every un-catalogued variety on earth settled on his skin, unnoticed.

"Oh, my god!"

Time seemed to run fluidly backwards as they checked the clips on their weapons, secured them in the holsters, and began to move down the path. Enormous leaves slapped Mulder in the face as he tore along the trail, feeling like he was making no progress at all. He acknowledged that some of them were cutting his skin, but guessed that the pain would follow later. He had to get to his son. His head was pounding, and he could see some the people of his dreams at the periphery of his vision, moving along with him, but seemingly still. He felt as if he were quietly going out of his mind, while no one noticed.

Scully was right behind him, matching step for step. She was smaller, but no less quick. She could duck a lot of the foliage that he was taking straight in the face, and her fear kept her right on his heels. The mile-long trail to the cave's mouth seemed to take forever. It ended abruptly as Mulder's feet took four steps into a pool of warm water that gurgled over smooth rounded rocks. Splashes from his feet hit her in the face. He stopped suddenly, and Scully cannoned squarely into his ass, forcing him to take three more steps forward.

"Sorry."

They stood in water to their ankles, breathing hard after their dash through the vegetation. The clear water, dancing in the sunlight, flowed smoothly around their ankles. It was so warm that it barely registered against their skin as it seeped through their boots. Scully noted that they were now participants in the scene that she and Mulder had seen in the photograph that they had confiscated in New Mexico, and it felt surreal. The cave opening that stood before them was distinctive and recognizable.

Scully glanced over at Mulder. He was bleeding from multiple minor cuts on his head and face, from being whipped by the vegetation in the frenzied run through the forest, and a myriad unrecognizable insects had again settled upon his face and neck, now that he had stopped moving. He made no move to wave them away from his sweat-shiny skin. The only move he made was to wade back over to the side of the creek to set his pack down. He grabbed the hard hat and headlamp from his pack. Scully also pulled out her hard hat, and was soon outfitted as well. The people of his dream were waiting patiently in the opening of the cave, filling it to capacity. He glanced over at them, and felt his head pound again.

"Scully?"

"Yeah, Mulder."

"Can you see them?"

"Not yet, Mulder, but I think we're gaining on them. We'll catch up. We need to keep moving."

He knew she hadn't understood his question, but he didn't want to take the time to explain that he hadn't meant the kidnappers, but the people of his dreams, the dead people that he had been seeing even awake. He sighed.

Re-donning their packs, they switched on the headlamps and ventured into the cave. The spirits of the dead surrounded them, and to Mulder, they felt comforting and supportive. Even his headlamp didn't disperse the souls, and he was glad. He felt that he needed every one of them. Something major was about to happen, that didn't just involve him and his son, but the entire human race.

To Scully, the cave felt very cold and damp, and not at all inviting. She shivered at the difference between the jungle and the dank interior of the cavern. The hubbub that had embraced them in the rain forest, the din that seemed the very essence of life, was completely missing here in the cave. The only sound was that of water. Water dripped from stalactites into the slowly flowing river, and the sound of the river trickling along the floor of the cavern joined to make a musical sound that reverberated around the rounded walls, but it wasn't a living sound to Scully. It was a sound devoid of life, mechanical and unchanging, even if it was soothing and pleasant. And something was wrong with Mulder, something she couldn't put her finger on.


End file.
